girls:
5.3k births since 1904
#2300 (60th percentile)
boys:
1.3M births since 1880
#22 (100th percentile)
overall:
1.3M births since 1880
#28 (100th percentile)
The name Kenneth is the #28 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 1,286,919 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #22 (99.5% percentile) for all time with 1,281,581 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #2,300 (59.8% percentile) for all time with 5,338 births since 1904.
Kenneth has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1904 for girls).
The name Kenneth has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Kenneth reached its peak popularity in 1958, achieving the 98.0% percentile (ranked #14) with 12,386 births per million. The name was most common in 1951, with 13,517 births per million (ranked 97.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1951, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Kenneth ranks #254 for boys (72.2% percentile) with 718 births per million, which is 5.3% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Kenneth reached its peak popularity in 1964, achieving the 15.6% percentile (ranked #662) with 65 births per million. The name was most common in 1929, with 77 births per million (ranked 14.2% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2019.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Kenneth".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Kenneth.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Kenneth", 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 Kenneth.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Kenneth. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 60.9% confident that Kenneth is pronounced as KEH-nihth, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KEH-nuhth, at 39.1% 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 Kenneth? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Kenneth. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Kenneth, 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 IH0 TH) 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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