girls:
119 births since 1913
#5597 (2nd percentile)
boys:
67.8k births since 1880
#403 (91st percentile)
overall:
68k births since 1880
#886 (89th percentile)
The name Malcolm is the #886 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 67,964 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 88.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 88.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #403 (91.2% percentile) for all time with 67,845 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,597 (2.0% percentile) for all time with 119 births since 1913.
Malcolm has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1913 for girls).
The name Malcolm has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.8% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Malcolm reached its peak popularity in 1992, achieving the 74.0% percentile (ranked #201) with 712 births per million. The name was most common in 1992, with 712 births per million (ranked 74.0% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2009, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Malcolm ranks #280 for boys (69.3% percentile) with 616 births per million, which is 86.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Malcolm reached its peak popularity in 1988, achieving the 0.7% percentile (ranked #802) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1913, with 8 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1991.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Malcolm".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Malcolm.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Malcolm", 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 Malcolm.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Malcolm. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 85.4% confident that Malcolm is pronounced as MAL-kuhm, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is MAHL-kuhm, at 14.6% 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 Malcolm? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Malcolm. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Malcolm, 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 AE1 L K AH0 M) 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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