girls:
10k births since 1881
#1595 (72nd percentile)
boys:
182 births since 1919
#4404 (4th percentile)
overall:
10.2k births since 1881
#2644 (66th percentile)
The name Mercy is the #2,644 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 10,172 recorded births since 1881. This represents the 65.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 65.8% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1,595 (72.1% percentile) for all time with 9,990 births since 1881. For boys, it ranks #4,404 (3.9% percentile) for all time with 182 births since 1919.
Mercy first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1881 (1881 for girls and 1919 for boys). Birth data for Mercy is available in 135 out of the 143 years between 1881 and 2023 (135 years for girls and 13 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 Mercy has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 98.2% of all recorded births being female. In 2023, 92.4% of babies named Mercy were girls.
For girls, Mercy reached its peak popularity in 2019, achieving the 42.5% percentile (ranked #544) with 239 births per million. The name was most common in 2019, with 239 births per million (ranked 42.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 1988, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Mercy ranks #636 for girls (32.9% percentile) with 188 births per million, which is 78.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Mercy reached its peak popularity in 2023, achieving the 2.4% percentile (ranked #889) with 15 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 15 births per million (ranked 2.4% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2013, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Mercy is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #889 (2.4% percentile) with 15 births per million.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Mercy".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Mercy.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Mercy", 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 Mercy.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Mercy. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Mercy is pronounced as MER-see, which has 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 Mercy? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Mercy. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Mercy, 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 ER1 S 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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