girls:
692 births since 1917
#5024 (12th percentile)
boys:
104.8k births since 1880
#296 (94th percentile)
overall:
105.5k births since 1880
#652 (92nd percentile)
The name Maxwell is the #652 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 105,453 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 91.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 91.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #296 (93.6% percentile) for all time with 104,761 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,024 (12.1% percentile) for all time with 692 births since 1917.
Maxwell has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1917 for girls). Birth data for Maxwell is available in 143 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (143 years for boys and 32 years for girls). 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 Maxwell has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Maxwell reached its peak popularity in 2014, achieving the 88.4% percentile (ranked #106) with 1,825 births per million. The name was most common in 2014, with 1,825 births per million (ranked 88.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2016, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Maxwell ranks #180 for boys (80.3% percentile) with 1,083 births per million, which is 59.4% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Maxwell reached its peak popularity in 2017, achieving the 6.4% percentile (ranked #888) with 35 births per million. The name was most common in 2017, with 35 births per million (ranked 6.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Maxwell ranks #908 for girls (4.1% percentile) with 25 births per million, which is 72.0% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Maxwell".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Maxwell.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Maxwell", 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 Maxwell.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Maxwell. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 54.1% confident that Maxwell is pronounced as MAK-swehl, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is MAK-SWEHL, at 40.5% 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 Maxwell? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Maxwell. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Maxwell, 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 K S W EH0 L) 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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