girls:
815.1k births since 1915
#25 (100th percentile)
boys:
3.3k births since 1946
#2188 (52nd percentile)
overall:
818.3k births since 1915
#62 (99th percentile)
The name Michelle is the #62 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 818,309 recorded births since 1915. This represents the 99.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #25 (99.6% percentile) for all time with 815,059 births since 1915. For boys, it ranks #2,188 (52.3% percentile) for all time with 3,250 births since 1946.
Michelle first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1915 (1915 for girls and 1946 for boys). Birth data for Michelle is available in 106 out of the 109 years between 1915 and 2023 (106 years for girls and 65 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 Michelle has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Michelle reached its peak popularity in 1971, achieving the 99.9% percentile (ranked #2) with 18,920 births per million. The name was most common in 1969, with 19,468 births per million (ranked 99.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1972, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Michelle ranks #373 for girls (60.7% percentile) with 436 births per million, which is 2.2% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Michelle reached its peak popularity in 1971, achieving the 21.0% percentile (ranked #527) with 83 births per million. The name was most common in 1971, with 83 births per million (ranked 21.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2011.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Michelle".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Michelle.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Michelle", 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 Michelle.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Michelle. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Michelle is pronounced as mih-SHEHL, 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 Michelle? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Michelle. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Michelle, 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 SH EH1 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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