girls:
475 births since 1916
#5241 (8th percentile)
boys:
3.7k births since 1902
#2047 (55th percentile)
overall:
4.1k births since 1902
#4251 (45th percentile)
The name Mel is the #4,251 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 4,148 recorded births since 1902. This represents the 45.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 45.1% of all names). For boys, it ranks #2,047 (55.3% percentile) for all time with 3,673 births since 1902. For girls, it ranks #5,241 (8.3% percentile) for all time with 475 births since 1916.
Mel first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1902 (1902 for boys and 1916 for girls). Birth data for Mel is available in 116 out of the 122 years between 1902 and 2023 (115 years for boys and 48 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 Mel has been given predominantly to boys, with 88.5% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 38.5% of babies named Mel were boys.
For boys, Mel reached its peak popularity in 1958, achieving the 17.2% percentile (ranked #551) with 56 births per million. The name was most common in 1942, with 57 births per million (ranked 13.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Mel ranks #906 for boys (0.5% percentile) with 5 births per million, which is 9.6% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Mel reached its peak popularity in 2004, achieving the 2.7% percentile (ranked #912) with 15 births per million. The name was most common in 2004, with 15 births per million (ranked 2.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2015, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Mel ranks #936 for girls (1.2% percentile) with 9 births per million, which is 61.5% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Mel".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Mel.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Mel", 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 Mel.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Mel. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Mel is pronounced as mehl, 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 Mel? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Mel. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Mel, 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 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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