girls:
62.3k births since 1880
#509 (91st percentile)
boys:
232.9k births since 1880
#165 (96th percentile)
overall:
295.1k births since 1880
#257 (97th percentile)
The name Lee is the #257 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 295,126 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #165 (96.4% percentile) for all time with 232,875 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #509 (91.1% percentile) for all time with 62,251 births since 1880.
Lee has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Lee has been given predominantly to boys, with 78.9% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 94.0% of babies named Lee were boys.
For boys, Lee reached its peak popularity in 1936, achieving the 85.7% percentile (ranked #75) with 2,272 births per million. The name was most common in 1900, with 4,163 births per million (ranked 84.9% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Lee ranks #567 for boys (37.8% percentile) with 205 births per million, which is 4.9% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Lee reached its peak popularity in 1956, achieving the 75.6% percentile (ranked #183) with 941 births per million. The name was most common in 1956, with 941 births per million (ranked 75.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Lee ranks #928 for girls (2.0% percentile) with 14 births per million, which is 1.5% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Lee".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Lee.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Lee", 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 Lee.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Lee. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Lee is pronounced as lee, which has 1 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 Lee? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Lee. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Lee, 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) 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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