girls:
2.1k births since 1880
#3750 (34th percentile)
boys:
243.9k births since 1880
#155 (97th percentile)
overall:
246k births since 1880
#323 (96th percentile)
The name Leo is the #323 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 245,997 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 95.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #155 (96.6% percentile) for all time with 243,902 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,750 (34.4% percentile) for all time with 2,095 births since 1880.
Leo has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Leo has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.1% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Leo reached its peak popularity in 2023, achieving the 98.1% percentile (ranked #18) with 4,434 births per million. The name was most common in 1903, with 4,918 births per million (ranked 84.2% percentile). Despite a peak around 1995, the name has seen a recent rise in popularity for boys. Currently, Leo ranks #18 for boys (98.1% percentile) with 4,434 births per million, which is 90.2% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Leo reached its peak popularity in 1918, achieving the 9.7% percentile (ranked #533) with 52 births per million. The name was most common in 1896, with 87 births per million (ranked 5.2% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2011, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Leo ranks #924 for girls (2.4% percentile) with 16 births per million, which is 18.3% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Leo".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Leo.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Leo", 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 Leo.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Leo. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Leo is pronounced as LEE-oh, 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 Leo? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Leo. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Leo, 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 OW0) 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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