girls:
800.1k births since 1880
#26 (100th percentile)
boys:
2.6k births since 1882
#2488 (46th percentile)
overall:
802.7k births since 1880
#66 (99th percentile)
The name Laura is the #66 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 802,667 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #26 (99.6% percentile) for all time with 800,088 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #2,488 (45.7% percentile) for all time with 2,579 births since 1882.
Laura has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1882 for boys).
The name Laura has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Laura reached its peak popularity in 1969, achieving the 98.8% percentile (ranked #10) with 10,167 births per million. The name was most common in 1968, with 10,962 births per million (ranked 98.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1986, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Laura ranks #341 for girls (64.1% percentile) with 479 births per million, which is 4.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Laura reached its peak popularity in 1963, achieving the 9.4% percentile (ranked #586) with 32 births per million. The name was most common in 1898, with 106 births per million (ranked 3.9% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2011.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Laura".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Laura.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Laura", 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 Laura.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Laura. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Laura is pronounced as LAW-ruh, which has 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 Laura? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Laura. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Laura, 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 L AO1 R 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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