girls:
485 births since 1995
#5231 (8th percentile)
boys:
315.2k births since 1947
#106 (98th percentile)
overall:
315.7k births since 1947
#239 (97th percentile)
The name Liam is the #239 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 315,669 recorded births since 1947. This represents the 96.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #106 (97.7% percentile) for all time with 315,184 births since 1947. For girls, it ranks #5,231 (8.5% percentile) for all time with 485 births since 1995.
Liam first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1947 (1947 for boys and 1995 for girls). Birth data for Liam is available in 72 out of the 77 years between 1947 and 2023 (72 years for boys and 24 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 Liam has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.8% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Liam reached its peak popularity in 2017, achieving the 100.0% percentile (ranked #1) with 9,527 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 11,360 births per million (ranked 100.0% percentile). Despite a peak around 1986, the name has seen a recent rise in popularity for boys. Currently, Liam is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #1 (100.0% percentile) with 11,360 births per million.
For girls, Liam reached its peak popularity in 2017, achieving the 3.5% percentile (ranked #916) with 20 births per million. The name was most common in 2017, with 20 births per million (ranked 3.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Liam ranks #922 for girls (2.6% percentile) with 17 births per million, which is 85.3% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Liam".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Liam.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Liam", 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 Liam.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Liam. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Liam is pronounced as LEE-uhm, 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 Liam? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Liam. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Liam, 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 AH0 M) 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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