girls:
25.2k births since 1952
#903 (84th percentile)
boys:
2.1k births since 1964
#2723 (41st percentile)
overall:
27.3k births since 1952
#1537 (80th percentile)
The name Kenya is the #1,537 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 27,348 recorded births since 1952. This represents the 80.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 80.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #903 (84.2% percentile) for all time with 25,215 births since 1952. For boys, it ranks #2,723 (40.6% percentile) for all time with 2,133 births since 1964.
Kenya first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1952 (1952 for girls and 1964 for boys). Birth data for Kenya is available in 71 out of the 72 years between 1952 and 2023 (71 years for girls and 56 years for boys). 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 Kenya has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 92.2% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Kenya reached its peak popularity in 1973, achieving the 64.3% percentile (ranked #265) with 575 births per million. The name was most common in 1973, with 575 births per million (ranked 64.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2009, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Kenya ranks #817 for girls (13.7% percentile) with 77 births per million, which is 13.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Kenya reached its peak popularity in 1973, achieving the 21.5% percentile (ranked #506) with 90 births per million. The name was most common in 1973, with 90 births per million (ranked 21.5% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2019.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Kenya".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Kenya.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Kenya", 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 Kenya.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Kenya. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 67.7% confident that Kenya is pronounced as KEH-nyuh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is KEH-nee-uh, at 17.7% confidence, with 3 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 Kenya? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Kenya. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Kenya, 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 Y AH0) 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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