girls:
269.5k births since 1880
#146 (97th percentile)
boys:
112.9k births since 1880
#278 (94th percentile)
overall:
382.4k births since 1880
#187 (98th percentile)
The name Leslie is the #187 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 382,441 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 97.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 97.6% of all names). For girls, it ranks #146 (97.5% percentile) for all time with 269,525 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #278 (94.0% percentile) for all time with 112,916 births since 1880.
Leslie has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Leslie has been given predominantly to girls, with 70.5% of all recorded births being female. In 2023, 91.6% of babies named Leslie were girls. Interestingly, until around 1949, the name was more popular for boys (78.6% boys from 1880 to 1948), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (83.0% girls from 1949 to 2023).
For girls, Leslie reached its peak popularity in 1981, achieving the 92.9% percentile (ranked #56) with 2,759 births per million. The name was most common in 1969, with 3,310 births per million (ranked 91.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2004, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Leslie ranks #549 for girls (42.1% percentile) with 251 births per million, which is 7.6% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Leslie reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 81.1% percentile (ranked #102) with 1,516 births per million. The name was most common in 1902, with 1,891 births per million (ranked 64.8% percentile). Despite a low point around 2014, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for boys. Currently, Leslie ranks #876 for boys (3.8% percentile) with 22 births per million, which is 1.2% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Leslie".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Leslie.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Leslie", 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 Leslie.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Leslie. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 57.4% confident that Leslie is pronounced as LEHZ-lee, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is LEH-slee, at 42.6% 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 Leslie? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Leslie. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Leslie, 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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