girls:
278 births since 1895
#5438 (5th percentile)
boys:
2.6k births since 1886
#2492 (46th percentile)
overall:
2.9k births since 1886
#5061 (35th percentile)
The name Merl is the #5,061 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 2,852 recorded births since 1886. This represents the 34.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 34.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #2,492 (45.6% percentile) for all time with 2,574 births since 1886. For girls, it ranks #5,438 (4.8% percentile) for all time with 278 births since 1895.
Merl first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1886 (1886 for boys and 1895 for girls). Birth data for Merl is available in 89 out of the 101 years between 1886 and 1986 (89 years for boys and 34 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 Merl has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 90.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Merl reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 14.4% percentile (ranked #458) with 81 births per million. The name was most common in 1907, with 114 births per million (ranked 5.2% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1986.
For girls, Merl reached its peak popularity in 1926, achieving the 1.7% percentile (ranked #594) with 12 births per million. The name was most common in 1895, with 32 births per million (ranked 0.9% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1966.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Merl".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Merle. View all variations of Merle.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Merl", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 9 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Merle" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Merle..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Merl. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Merl is pronounced as merl, 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 Merl? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Merl. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Merl, 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 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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