girls:
490 births since 1890
#5226 (9th percentile)
boys:
39.6k births since 1880
#566 (88th percentile)
overall:
40k births since 1880
#1239 (84th percentile)
The name Laurence is the #1,239 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 40,050 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 84.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 84.0% of all names). For boys, it ranks #566 (87.7% percentile) for all time with 39,560 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,226 (8.5% percentile) for all time with 490 births since 1890.
Laurence has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1890 for girls).
The name Laurence has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.8% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Laurence reached its peak popularity in 1951, achieving the 63.4% percentile (ranked #223) with 430 births per million. The name was most common in 1912, with 600 births per million (ranked 51.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2021, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Laurence ranks #849 for boys (6.8% percentile) with 37 births per million, which is 6.1% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Laurence reached its peak popularity in 1925, achieving the 2.1% percentile (ranked #601) with 14 births per million. The name was most common in 1891, with 36 births per million (ranked 0.7% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Laurence".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Lawrence. View all variations of Lawrence.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Laurence", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 17 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Lawrence" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Lawrence..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Laurence. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Laurence is pronounced as LAW-ruhns, 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 Laurence? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Laurence. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Laurence, 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 N S) 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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