girls:
248.5k births since 1880
#163 (97th percentile)
boys:
467 births since 1962
#4119 (10th percentile)
overall:
249k births since 1880
#317 (96th percentile)
The name Leah is the #317 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 249,010 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 95.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.9% of all names). For girls, it ranks #163 (97.2% percentile) for all time with 248,543 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,119 (10.1% percentile) for all time with 467 births since 1962.
Leah has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1962 for boys).
The name Leah has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.8% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Leah reached its peak popularity in 2010, achieving the 97.6% percentile (ranked #24) with 3,336 births per million. The name was most common in 2009, with 3,352 births per million (ranked 97.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2013, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Leah ranks #51 for girls (94.7% percentile) with 2,260 births per million, which is 67.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Leah reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 3.0% percentile (ranked #734) with 11 births per million. The name was most common in 1989, with 11 births per million (ranked 3.0% 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 "Leah".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Leah.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Leah", 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 Leah.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Leah. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 76.5% confident that Leah is pronounced as LEE-uh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is LAY-uh, at 23.5% 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 Leah? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Leah. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Leah, 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 IY1 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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