girls:
758.5k births since 1880
#28 (100th percentile)
boys:
2.5k births since 1956
#2530 (45th percentile)
overall:
761k births since 1880
#72 (99th percentile)
The name Melissa is the #72 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 761,045 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #28 (99.5% percentile) for all time with 758,550 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #2,530 (44.8% percentile) for all time with 2,495 births since 1956.
Melissa has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1956 for boys).
The name Melissa has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Melissa reached its peak popularity in 1979, achieving the 99.9% percentile (ranked #2) with 19,759 births per million. The name was most common in 1979, with 19,759 births per million (ranked 99.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1980, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Melissa ranks #380 for girls (59.9% percentile) with 424 births per million, which is 2.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Melissa reached its peak popularity in 1980, achieving the 19.6% percentile (ranked #548) with 74 births per million. The name was most common in 1980, with 74 births per million (ranked 19.6% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2015.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Melissa".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Melissa.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Melissa", 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 Melissa.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Melissa. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 72.5% confident that Melissa is pronounced as muh-LIH-suh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is MEH-lih-suh, at 15.0% 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 Melissa? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Melissa. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Melissa, 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 AH0 L IH1 S AH0) 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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