girls:
473.3k births since 1907
#68 (99th percentile)
boys:
82.2k births since 1880
#353 (92nd percentile)
overall:
555.5k births since 1880
#114 (99th percentile)
The name Kelly is the #114 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 555,531 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #68 (98.8% percentile) for all time with 473,327 births since 1907. For boys, it ranks #353 (92.3% percentile) for all time with 82,204 births since 1880.
Kelly has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1907 for girls).
The name Kelly has been given predominantly to girls, with 85.2% of all recorded births being female. In 2023, 79.6% of babies named Kelly were girls. Interestingly, until around 1958, the name was more popular for boys (73.8% boys from 1880 to 1957), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (87.5% girls from 1958 to 2023).
For girls, Kelly reached its peak popularity in 1977, achieving the 98.8% percentile (ranked #10) with 11,084 births per million. The name was most common in 1977, with 11,084 births per million (ranked 98.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1980, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Kelly ranks #610 for girls (35.6% percentile) with 207 births per million, which is 1.9% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Kelly reached its peak popularity in 1968, achieving the 85.0% percentile (ranked #97) with 1,722 births per million. The name was most common in 1967, with 1,738 births per million (ranked 84.4% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2014, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Kelly ranks #823 for boys (9.7% percentile) with 51 births per million, which is 2.9% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Kelly".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Kelly.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Kelly", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Kelly.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Kelly. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Kelly is pronounced as KEH-lee, which has 2 syllables.
If none of the pronunciations above sound right to you, could you please check whether any of these related pronunciations should be applied to the name Kelly? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Kelly. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Kelly, please vote using the thumbs up button.
Our confidence scores estimate the likelihood that a particular pronunciation is the most correct for a given name spelling. These scores are derived from pronunciation dictionaries, manual verification, your feedback, and a fine-tuned large language model trained to generate name pronunciations.
For any given spelling, confidence scores across all identified pronunciations sum to 100%. However, these scores don't account for the possibility of valid pronunciations that our model hasn't identified.
The raw pronunciations shown (like K EH1 L IY0) use the ARPAbet phoneme system, a standardized way to represent English speech sounds. Each symbol represents a distinct sound in American English. Visit the ARPAbet Wikipedia page to learn more about these phonetic symbols.
Pronunciation audio is generated by an open source text to speech model that has been customized to adhere to pronunciations provided in ARPAbet format, but sometimes pronunciations that differ subtly will sound identical, particularly if the only difference is the level of emphasis on a syllable or a single vowel sound.
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