girls:
304 births since 1956
#5412 (5th percentile)
boys:
51.1k births since 1912
#494 (89th percentile)
overall:
51.4k births since 1912
#1061 (86th percentile)
The name Kelvin is the #1,061 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 51,433 recorded births since 1912. This represents the 86.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 86.3% of all names). For boys, it ranks #494 (89.2% percentile) for all time with 51,129 births since 1912. For girls, it ranks #5,412 (5.3% percentile) for all time with 304 births since 1956.
Kelvin first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1912 (1912 for boys and 1956 for girls). Birth data for Kelvin is available in 103 out of the 112 years between 1912 and 2023 (103 years for boys and 36 years for girls). The Social Security Administration only reports birth data for years in which the name was given to at least five children of the same gender.
The name Kelvin has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.4% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Kelvin reached its peak popularity in 1961, achieving the 69.3% percentile (ranked #205) with 635 births per million. The name was most common in 1963, with 645 births per million (ranked 68.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1991, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Kelvin ranks #687 for boys (24.6% percentile) with 126 births per million, which is 19.6% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Kelvin reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 1.3% percentile (ranked #814) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1972, with 8 births per million (ranked 1.1% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2004.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Kelvin".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Kelvin.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Kelvin", 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 Kelvin.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Kelvin. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 80.4% confident that Kelvin is pronounced as KEHL-vihn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KEHL-vuhn, at 19.6% confidence, with 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 Kelvin? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Kelvin. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Kelvin, 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 V IH0 N) 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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