girls:
34k births since 1880
#750 (87th percentile)
boys:
3.9k births since 1880
#1968 (57th percentile)
overall:
37.9k births since 1880
#1280 (83rd percentile)
The name Lou is the #1,280 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 37,906 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 83.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 83.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #750 (86.9% percentile) for all time with 33,970 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #1,968 (57.1% percentile) for all time with 3,936 births since 1880.
Lou has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Lou has been given predominantly to girls, with 89.6% of all recorded births being female. In 2023, 48.3% of babies named Lou were girls. Interestingly, until around 1987, the name was more popular for girls (91.7% girls from 1880 to 1986), but since then it has been more commonly used for boys (58.4% boys from 1987 to 2023).
For girls, Lou reached its peak popularity in 1954, achieving the 72.2% percentile (ranked #202) with 751 births per million. The name was most common in 1880, with 1,342 births per million (ranked 45.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2010, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Lou ranks #883 for girls (6.8% percentile) with 39 births per million, which is 2.9% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Lou reached its peak popularity in 1957, achieving the 10.2% percentile (ranked #591) with 33 births per million. The name was most common in 1889, with 143 births per million (ranked 5.9% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2007, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Lou ranks #842 for boys (7.6% percentile) with 40 births per million, which is 28.3% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Lou".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Lou.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Lou", 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 Lou.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Lou. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Lou is pronounced as lue, which has 1 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 Lou? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Lou. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Lou, 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 UW1) 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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