girls:
373k births since 1899
#98 (98th percentile)
boys:
1.1k births since 1922
#3530 (23rd percentile)
overall:
374k births since 1899
#191 (98th percentile)
The name Marilyn is the #191 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 374,047 recorded births since 1899. This represents the 97.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 97.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #98 (98.3% percentile) for all time with 372,981 births since 1899. For boys, it ranks #3,530 (23.0% percentile) for all time with 1,066 births since 1922.
Marilyn first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1899 (1899 for girls and 1922 for boys). Birth data for Marilyn is available in 124 out of the 125 years between 1899 and 2023 (124 years for girls and 62 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 Marilyn has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Marilyn reached its peak popularity in 1937, achieving the 97.9% percentile (ranked #13) with 8,838 births per million. The name was most common in 1936, with 10,268 births per million (ranked 97.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2016, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Marilyn ranks #596 for girls (37.1% percentile) with 216 births per million, which is 2.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Marilyn reached its peak popularity in 1937, achieving the 7.6% percentile (ranked #484) with 41 births per million. The name was most common in 1937, with 41 births per million (ranked 7.6% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1997.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Marilyn".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Marilyn.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Marilyn", 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 Marilyn.
Our model has identified 7 different pronunciations for the name Marilyn. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 37.0% confident that Marilyn is pronounced as MEH-ruh-lihn, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is MA-ruh-lihn, at 28.3% 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 Marilyn? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Marilyn. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Marilyn, 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 EH1 R AH0 L IH0 N) 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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