girls:
250.5k births since 1880
#162 (97th percentile)
boys:
983 births since 1948
#3609 (21st percentile)
overall:
251.5k births since 1880
#314 (96th percentile)
The name Monica is the #314 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 251,480 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.0% of all names). For girls, it ranks #162 (97.2% percentile) for all time with 250,497 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,609 (21.3% percentile) for all time with 983 births since 1948.
Monica has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1948 for boys). Birth data for Monica is available in 143 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (143 years for girls and 44 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 Monica has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Monica reached its peak popularity in 1977, achieving the 95.0% percentile (ranked #39) with 3,870 births per million. The name was most common in 1973, with 4,103 births per million (ranked 94.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1996, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Monica ranks #587 for girls (38.1% percentile) with 221 births per million, which is 5.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Monica reached its peak popularity in 1973, achieving the 5.8% percentile (ranked #607) with 26 births per million. The name was most common in 1973, with 26 births per million (ranked 5.8% 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 "Monica".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Monica.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Monica", 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 Monica.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Monica. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 69.4% confident that Monica is pronounced as MAH-nih-kuh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is mah-NIH-kuh, at 13.9% 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 Monica? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Monica. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Monica, 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 AA1 N IH0 K 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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