girls:
642 births since 1937
#5074 (11th percentile)
boys:
31 births since 1979
#4555 (1st percentile)
overall:
673 births since 1937
#7066 (9th percentile)
The name Lei is the #7,066 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 673 recorded births since 1937. This represents the 8.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 8.7% of all names). For girls, it ranks #5,074 (11.2% percentile) for all time with 642 births since 1937. For boys, it ranks #4,555 (0.6% percentile) for all time with 31 births since 1979.
Lei first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1937 (1937 for girls and 1979 for boys). Birth data for Lei is available in 68 out of the 87 years between 1937 and 2023 (65 years for girls and 6 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 Lei has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 95.4% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Lei reached its peak popularity in 1960, achieving the 2.6% percentile (ranked #751) with 12 births per million. The name was most common in 1962, with 12 births per million (ranked 2.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Lei ranks #945 for girls (0.2% percentile) with 4 births per million, which is 32.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Lei reached its peak popularity in 2015, achieving the 0.1% percentile (ranked #904) with 3 births per million. The name was most common in 2015, with 3 births per million (ranked 0.1% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2015.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Lei".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Lei.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Lei", 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 Lei.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Lei. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 88.6% confident that Lei is pronounced as lay, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is lee, at 11.4% confidence, with 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 Lei? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Lei. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Lei, 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 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.
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