girls:
258.3k births since 1886
#156 (97th percentile)
boys:
614 births since 1956
#3972 (13th percentile)
overall:
258.9k births since 1886
#306 (96th percentile)
The name Melanie is the #306 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 258,900 recorded births since 1886. This represents the 96.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #156 (97.3% percentile) for all time with 258,286 births since 1886. For boys, it ranks #3,972 (13.3% percentile) for all time with 614 births since 1956.
Melanie first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1886 (1886 for girls and 1956 for boys). Birth data for Melanie is available in 134 out of the 138 years between 1886 and 2023 (134 years for girls and 51 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 Melanie has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.8% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Melanie reached its peak popularity in 1972, achieving the 94.6% percentile (ranked #41) with 3,904 births per million. The name was most common in 1973, with 3,912 births per million (ranked 94.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2016, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Melanie ranks #127 for girls (86.7% percentile) with 1,209 births per million, which is 30.9% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Melanie reached its peak popularity in 1972, achieving the 2.9% percentile (ranked #642) with 14 births per million. The name was most common in 1972, with 14 births per million (ranked 2.9% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2017.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Melanie".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Melanie.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Melanie", 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 Melanie.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Melanie. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 89.1% confident that Melanie is pronounced as MEH-luh-nee, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is meh-LUH-nee, at 10.9% 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 Melanie? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Melanie. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Melanie, 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 AH0 N 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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