girls:
467.1k births since 1880
#71 (99th percentile)
boys:
1.4k births since 1882
#3211 (30th percentile)
overall:
468.5k births since 1880
#142 (98th percentile)
The name Lillian is the #142 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 468,517 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #71 (98.8% percentile) for all time with 467,088 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,211 (29.9% percentile) for all time with 1,429 births since 1882.
Lillian has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1882 for boys).
The name Lillian has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Lillian reached its peak popularity in 2010, achieving the 97.8% percentile (ranked #22) with 3,547 births per million. The name was most common in 1898, with 11,166 births per million (ranked 97.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2014, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Lillian ranks #53 for girls (94.5% percentile) with 2,245 births per million, which is 20.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Lillian reached its peak popularity in 1928, achieving the 7.6% percentile (ranked #502) with 40 births per million. The name was most common in 1901, with 147 births per million (ranked 5.5% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2020.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Lillian".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Lillian.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Lillian", 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 Lillian.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Lillian. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 84.8% confident that Lillian is pronounced as LIH-lee-uhn, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is LIHL-yuhn, at 15.2% 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 Lillian? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Lillian. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Lillian, 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 IH1 L IY0 AH0 N) 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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