girls:
176.6k births since 1880
#222 (96th percentile)
boys:
502 births since 1911
#4084 (11th percentile)
overall:
177.1k births since 1880
#432 (94th percentile)
The name Loretta is the #432 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 177,145 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 94.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 94.4% of all names). For girls, it ranks #222 (96.1% percentile) for all time with 176,643 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,084 (10.9% percentile) for all time with 502 births since 1911.
Loretta has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1911 for boys).
The name Loretta has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Loretta reached its peak popularity in 1938, achieving the 89.6% percentile (ranked #62) with 3,428 births per million. The name was most common in 1938, with 3,428 births per million (ranked 89.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2010, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Loretta ranks #605 for girls (36.2% percentile) with 210 births per million, which is 6.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Loretta reached its peak popularity in 1933, achieving the 3.1% percentile (ranked #505) with 21 births per million. The name was most common in 1911, with 29 births per million (ranked 0.7% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1981.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Loretta".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Loretta.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Loretta", 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 Loretta.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Loretta. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 48.8% confident that Loretta is pronounced as law-REH-tuh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is ler-EH-tuh, at 44.2% confidence, with 3 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 Loretta? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Loretta. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Loretta, 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 AO0 R EH1 T AH0) 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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