girls:
4.1M births since 1880
#1 (100th percentile)
boys:
15.2k births since 1880
#947 (79th percentile)
overall:
4.2M births since 1880
#6 (100th percentile)
The name Mary is the #6 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 4,152,044 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.9% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1 (100.0% percentile) for all time with 4,136,872 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #947 (79.4% percentile) for all time with 15,172 births since 1880.
Mary has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Mary has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Mary reached its peak popularity in 1880, achieving the 100.0% percentile (ranked #1) with 72,384 births per million. The name was most common in 1880, with 72,384 births per million (ranked 100.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1924, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Mary ranks #132 for girls (86.2% percentile) with 1,179 births per million, which is 1.6% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Mary reached its peak popularity in 1932, achieving the 46.7% percentile (ranked #283) with 307 births per million. The name was most common in 1906, with 528 births per million (ranked 28.9% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2020.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Mary".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Mary.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Mary", 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 Mary.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Mary. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Mary is pronounced as MEH-ree, 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 Mary? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Mary. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Mary, 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 IY0) 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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