girls:
71 births since 1923
#5645 (1st percentile)
boys:
20.8k births since 1880
#801 (83rd percentile)
overall:
20.8k births since 1880
#1774 (77th percentile)
The name Major is the #1,774 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 20,825 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 77.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 77.1% of all names). For boys, it ranks #801 (82.5% percentile) for all time with 20,754 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,645 (1.2% percentile) for all time with 71 births since 1923.
Major has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1923 for girls).
The name Major has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Major reached its peak popularity in 2017, achieving the 64.8% percentile (ranked #322) with 526 births per million. The name was most common in 2017, with 526 births per million (ranked 64.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Major ranks #456 for boys (50.0% percentile) with 315 births per million, which is 59.8% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Major reached its peak popularity in 2018, achieving the 0.6% percentile (ranked #955) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 2018, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Major ranks #947 for girls (0.0% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 48.3% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Major".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Major.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Major", 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 Major.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Major. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Major is pronounced as MAY-jer, 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 Major? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Major. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Major, 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 M EY1 JH ER0) 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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