girls:
10 births since 1970
#5706 (0th percentile)
boys:
159 births since 1914
#4427 (3rd percentile)
overall:
169 births since 1914
#7570 (2nd percentile)
The name Key is the #7,570 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 169 recorded births since 1914. This represents the 2.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 2.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #4,427 (3.4% percentile) for all time with 159 births since 1914. For girls, it ranks #5,706 (0.1% percentile) for all time with 10 births since 1970.
Key first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1914 (1914 for boys and 1970 for girls). Birth data for Key is available in 27 out of the 110 years between 1914 and 2023 (26 years for boys and 2 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 Key has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 94.1% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Key reached its peak popularity in 1993, achieving the 0.9% percentile (ranked #762) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1914, with 7 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2015, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Key ranks #908 for boys (0.3% percentile) with 4 births per million, which is 59.7% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Key reached its peak popularity in 1970, achieving the 0.0% percentile (ranked #773) with 3 births per million. The name was most common in 1970, with 3 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1999.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Key".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Kee. View all variations of Kee.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Key", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 5 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Kee" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Kee..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Key. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Key is pronounced as kee, 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 Key? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Key. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Key, 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 IY1) 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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