girls:
49k births since 1880
#584 (90th percentile)
boys:
699 births since 1882
#3888 (15th percentile)
overall:
49.7k births since 1880
#1078 (86th percentile)
The name May is the #1,078 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 49,746 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 86.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 86.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #584 (89.8% percentile) for all time with 49,047 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,888 (15.2% percentile) for all time with 699 births since 1882.
May has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1882 for boys).
The name May has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 98.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, May reached its peak popularity in 1888, achieving the 79.2% percentile (ranked #60) with 4,128 births per million. The name was most common in 1880, with 4,733 births per million (ranked 74.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2009, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, May ranks #796 for girls (16.0% percentile) with 89 births per million, which is 1.9% of its peak share of births.
For boys, May reached its peak popularity in 1925, achieving the 3.1% percentile (ranked #529) with 19 births per million. The name was most common in 1888, with 85 births per million (ranked 2.7% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1996.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "May".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Mae. View all variations of Mae.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "May", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 5 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Mae" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Mae..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name May. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that May is pronounced as may, which has 1 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 May? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with May. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for May, 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) 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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