girls:
1.6k births since 1912
#4137 (28th percentile)
boys:
3.4k births since 1908
#2143 (53rd percentile)
overall:
5k births since 1908
#3852 (50th percentile)
The name Merlyn is the #3,852 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 5,025 recorded births since 1908. This represents the 50.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 50.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #2,143 (53.3% percentile) for all time with 3,404 births since 1908. For girls, it ranks #4,137 (27.6% percentile) for all time with 1,621 births since 1912.
Merlyn first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1908 (1908 for boys and 1912 for girls). Birth data for Merlyn is available in 111 out of the 116 years between 1908 and 2023 (104 years for girls and 87 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 Merlyn has been given to both genders, with a slight preference for boys (67.7% of all recorded births). In 2023, 0.0% of babies named Merlyn were boys. Interestingly, until around 1984, the name was more popular for boys (73.9% boys from 1908 to 1983), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (79.4% girls from 1984 to 2023).
For boys, Merlyn reached its peak popularity in 1930, achieving the 24.0% percentile (ranked #399) with 121 births per million. The name was most common in 1930, with 121 births per million (ranked 24.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2022.
For girls, Merlyn reached its peak popularity in 1925, achieving the 5.9% percentile (ranked #578) with 32 births per million. The name was most common in 1936, with 35 births per million (ranked 5.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2016, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Merlyn ranks #941 for girls (0.6% percentile) with 6 births per million, which is 17.8% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Merlyn".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Merlin. View all variations of Merlin.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Merlyn", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 11 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Merlin" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Merlin..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Merlyn. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Merlyn is pronounced as MER-lihn, 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 Merlyn? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Merlyn. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Merlyn, 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 IH0 N) 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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