girls:
52.9k births since 1921
#562 (90th percentile)
boys:
69 births since 1966
#4517 (1st percentile)
overall:
53k births since 1921
#1046 (86th percentile)
The name Michaela is the #1,046 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 52,980 recorded births since 1921. This represents the 86.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 86.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #562 (90.2% percentile) for all time with 52,911 births since 1921. For boys, it ranks #4,517 (1.4% percentile) for all time with 69 births since 1966.
Michaela first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1921 (1921 for girls and 1966 for boys). Birth data for Michaela is available in 92 out of the 103 years between 1921 and 2023 (92 years for girls and 10 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 Michaela has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.9% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Michaela reached its peak popularity in 1997, achieving the 88.5% percentile (ranked #100) with 1,780 births per million. The name was most common in 1997, with 1,780 births per million (ranked 88.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1998, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Michaela ranks #532 for girls (43.9% percentile) with 261 births per million, which is 14.7% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Michaela reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 0.8% percentile (ranked #751) with 3 births per million. The name was most common in 1999, with 5 births per million (ranked 0.6% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2004.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Michaela".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Makayla. View all variations of Makayla.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Michaela", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 133 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Makayla" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Makayla..
Our model has identified 7 different pronunciations for the name Michaela. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 45.1% confident that Michaela is pronounced as mih-KAY-luh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is mai-KEH-luh, at 11.8% 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 Michaela? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Michaela. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Michaela, 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 IH0 K EY1 L 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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