girls:
197 births since 1952
#5519 (3rd percentile)
boys:
68k births since 1880
#400 (91st percentile)
overall:
68.2k births since 1880
#883 (89th percentile)
The name Kirk is the #883 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 68,166 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 88.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 88.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #400 (91.3% percentile) for all time with 67,969 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,519 (3.4% percentile) for all time with 197 births since 1952.
Kirk has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1952 for girls). Birth data for Kirk is available in 134 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (134 years for boys and 25 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 Kirk has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Kirk reached its peak popularity in 1961, achieving the 79.5% percentile (ranked #137) with 1,165 births per million. The name was most common in 1962, with 1,216 births per million (ranked 79.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2013, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Kirk ranks #864 for boys (5.2% percentile) with 28 births per million, which is 2.3% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Kirk reached its peak popularity in 1970, achieving the 1.0% percentile (ranked #765) with 7 births per million. The name was most common in 1970, with 7 births per million (ranked 1.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1993.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Kirk".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Kirk.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Kirk", 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 Kirk.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Kirk. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.0% confident that Kirk is pronounced as kerk, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is kerk, at 10.0% confidence, with 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 Kirk? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Kirk. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Kirk, 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 ER1 K) 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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