Lay

girls:

12 births since 2014

#5704 (0th percentile)

boys:

28 births since 1918

#4558 (1st percentile)

overall:

40 births since 1918

#7699 (0th percentile)

Popularity Trends

The name Lay is the #7,699 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 40 recorded births since 1918. This represents the 0.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 0.5% of all names). For boys, it ranks #4,558 (0.5% percentile) for all time with 28 births since 1918. For girls, it ranks #5,704 (0.2% percentile) for all time with 12 births since 2014.

Lay first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1918 (1918 for boys and 2014 for girls). Birth data for Lay is available in 5 out of the 99 years between 1918 and 2016 (5 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 Lay has been given to both genders, with a slight preference for boys (70.0% of all recorded births). In 2016, 58.3% of babies named Lay were boys.

For boys, Lay reached its peak popularity in 2016, achieving the 0.2% percentile (ranked #919) with 3 births per million. The name was most common in 1918, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.2% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2016.

For girls, Lay reached its peak popularity in 2014, achieving the 0.2% percentile (ranked #965) with 4 births per million. The name was most common in 2014, with 4 births per million (ranked 0.2% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2016.

This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Lay".

1918 2016 19182016

Key Statistics

Total Births
12
Peak Births
7
Peak Year
2014
First Recorded
2014
Peak Percentile
0.2%
Current Percentile
Peak Rank
#965
Current Rank
Female statistics
Total Births
28
Peak Births
7
Peak Year
2016
First Recorded
1918
Peak Percentile
0.2%
Current Percentile
Peak Rank
#919
Current Rank
Male statistics

How to Pronounce Lay

Our model found one way to pronounce the name Lay. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.

Our model is 100.0% confident that Lay is pronounced as lay, which has 1 syllables.

1
100.0%
lay (1 syllable)
Verified
100.0% confidence
L EY1

Possible Additional Pronunciations

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 Lay? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Lay. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Lay, please vote using the thumbs up button.

About Pronunciation Data

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 EY1) 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.

© 2025 NamePlay.org

Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker