girls:
46.3k births since 1883
#608 (89th percentile)
boys:
1.9k births since 1887
#2902 (37th percentile)
overall:
48.2k births since 1883
#1102 (86th percentile)
The name Laurel is the #1,102 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 48,208 recorded births since 1883. This represents the 85.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 85.8% of all names). For girls, it ranks #608 (89.4% percentile) for all time with 46,348 births since 1883. For boys, it ranks #2,902 (36.7% percentile) for all time with 1,860 births since 1887.
Laurel first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1883 (1883 for girls and 1887 for boys). Birth data for Laurel is available in 140 out of the 141 years between 1883 and 2023 (139 years for girls and 86 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 Laurel has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 96.1% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Laurel reached its peak popularity in 1956, achieving the 68.0% percentile (ranked #240) with 573 births per million. The name was most common in 1956, with 573 births per million (ranked 68.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Laurel ranks #582 for girls (38.6% percentile) with 224 births per million, which is 39.0% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Laurel reached its peak popularity in 1926, achieving the 11.6% percentile (ranked #487) with 60 births per million. The name was most common in 1904, with 65 births per million (ranked 1.7% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Laurel".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Laurel.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Laurel", 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 Laurel.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Laurel. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.7% confident that Laurel is pronounced as LAW-ruhl, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is LAW-rehl, at 9.3% 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 Laurel? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Laurel. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Laurel, 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 L) 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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