girls:
21.8k births since 1897
#974 (83rd percentile)
boys:
4.4M births since 1880
#4 (100th percentile)
overall:
4.4M births since 1880
#4 (100th percentile)
The name Michael is the #4 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 4,431,942 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 100.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 100.0% of all names). For boys, it ranks #4 (99.9% percentile) for all time with 4,410,095 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #974 (83.0% percentile) for all time with 21,847 births since 1897.
Michael has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1897 for girls).
The name Michael has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.5% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Michael reached its peak popularity in 1954, achieving the 100.0% percentile (ranked #1) with 42,802 births per million. The name was most common in 1969, with 46,558 births per million (ranked 100.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1970, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Michael ranks #16 for boys (98.4% percentile) with 4,578 births per million, which is 9.8% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Michael reached its peak popularity in 1986, achieving the 55.0% percentile (ranked #367) with 320 births per million. The name was most common in 1975, with 357 births per million (ranked 53.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2017, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Michael ranks #932 for girls (1.6% percentile) with 11 births per million, which is 3.2% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Michael".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Michael.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Michael", 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 Michael.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Michael. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 89.1% confident that Michael is pronounced as MAI-kuhl, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is MIH-kuhl, at 10.9% confidence, with 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 Michael? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Michael. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Michael, 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 AY1 K AH0 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker