girls:
4k births since 1886
#2716 (52nd percentile)
boys:
35 births since 1918
#4551 (1st percentile)
overall:
4.1k births since 1886
#4301 (44th percentile)
The name Lu is the #4,301 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 4,067 recorded births since 1886. This represents the 44.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 44.4% of all names). For girls, it ranks #2,716 (52.5% percentile) for all time with 4,032 births since 1886. For boys, it ranks #4,551 (0.7% percentile) for all time with 35 births since 1918.
Lu first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1886 (1886 for girls and 1918 for boys). Birth data for Lu is available in 99 out of the 138 years between 1886 and 2023 (97 years for girls and 6 years for boys). 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 Lu has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.1% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Lu reached its peak popularity in 1954, achieving the 42.5% percentile (ranked #416) with 198 births per million. The name was most common in 1954, with 198 births per million (ranked 42.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2016, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Lu ranks #941 for girls (0.6% percentile) with 6 births per million, which is 3.2% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Lu reached its peak popularity in 1918, achieving the 0.2% percentile (ranked #530) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1919, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.2% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Lu".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Lou. View all variations of Lou.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Lu", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 6 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Lou" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Lou..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Lu. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Lu 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 Lu? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Lu. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Lu, 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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