girls:
1.4k births since 1886
#4367 (24th percentile)
boys:
130.5k births since 1880
#251 (95th percentile)
overall:
131.8k births since 1880
#565 (93rd percentile)
The name Lester is the #565 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 131,827 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 92.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 92.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #251 (94.5% percentile) for all time with 130,468 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #4,367 (23.6% percentile) for all time with 1,359 births since 1886.
Lester has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1886 for girls).
The name Lester has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.0% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Lester reached its peak popularity in 1915, achieving the 89.0% percentile (ranked #56) with 3,341 births per million. The name was most common in 1906, with 3,346 births per million (ranked 78.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2018, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Lester ranks #834 for boys (8.5% percentile) with 45 births per million, which is 1.3% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Lester reached its peak popularity in 1927, achieving the 5.8% percentile (ranked #568) with 32 births per million. The name was most common in 1905, with 58 births per million (ranked 3.7% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1985.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Lester".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Lester.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Lester", 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 Lester.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Lester. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Lester is pronounced as LEH-ster, 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 Lester? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Lester. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Lester, 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 S T ER0) 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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