girls:
34.2k births since 1893
#746 (87th percentile)
boys:
4.8k births since 1882
#1733 (62nd percentile)
overall:
39k births since 1882
#1261 (84th percentile)
The name Lesley is the #1,261 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 39,030 recorded births since 1882. This represents the 83.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 83.7% of all names). For girls, it ranks #746 (87.0% percentile) for all time with 34,232 births since 1893. For boys, it ranks #1,733 (62.2% percentile) for all time with 4,798 births since 1882.
Lesley first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1882 (1882 for boys and 1893 for girls). Birth data for Lesley is available in 128 out of the 142 years between 1882 and 2023 (117 years for boys and 113 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 Lesley has been given predominantly to girls, with 87.7% of all recorded births being female. In 2023, 100.0% of babies named Lesley were girls. Interestingly, until around 1893, the name was more popular for boys (100.0% boys from 1882 to 1892), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (87.7% girls from 1893 to 2023).
For girls, Lesley reached its peak popularity in 1979, achieving the 67.3% percentile (ranked #258) with 530 births per million. The name was most common in 1979, with 530 births per million (ranked 67.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2000, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Lesley ranks #923 for girls (2.5% percentile) with 17 births per million, which is 3.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Lesley reached its peak popularity in 1967, achieving the 14.8% percentile (ranked #541) with 56 births per million. The name was most common in 1903, with 131 births per million (ranked 5.3% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2016.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Lesley".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Leslie. View all variations of Leslie.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Lesley", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 19 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Leslie" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Leslie..
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Lesley. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 55.1% confident that Lesley is pronounced as LEHZ-lee, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is LEH-slee, at 44.9% 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 Lesley? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Lesley. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Lesley, 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 EH1 Z L IY0) 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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