girls:
25 births since 1961
#5691 (0th percentile)
boys:
32.9k births since 1900
#623 (86th percentile)
overall:
33k births since 1900
#1388 (82nd percentile)
The name Ken is the #1,388 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 32,966 recorded births since 1900. This represents the 82.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 82.1% of all names). For boys, it ranks #623 (86.4% percentile) for all time with 32,941 births since 1900. For girls, it ranks #5,691 (0.4% percentile) for all time with 25 births since 1961.
Ken first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1900 (1900 for boys and 1961 for girls). Birth data for Ken is available in 115 out of the 124 years between 1900 and 2023 (115 years for boys and 5 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 Ken has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.9% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Ken reached its peak popularity in 1960, achieving the 73.2% percentile (ranked #177) with 821 births per million. The name was most common in 1960, with 821 births per million (ranked 73.2% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2016, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Ken ranks #879 for boys (3.5% percentile) with 20 births per million, which is 2.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Ken reached its peak popularity in 1975, achieving the 0.0% percentile (ranked #753) with 3 births per million. The name was most common in 1975, with 3 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1990.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ken".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Ken.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ken", 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 Ken.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Ken. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Ken is pronounced as kehn, which has 1 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 Ken? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ken. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ken, 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 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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