girls:
177 births since 1974
#5539 (3rd percentile)
boys:
844 births since 1974
#3743 (18th percentile)
overall:
1k births since 1974
#6718 (13th percentile)
The name Nakai is the #6,718 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 1,021 recorded births since 1974. This represents the 13.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 13.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #3,743 (18.3% percentile) for all time with 844 births since 1974. For girls, it ranks #5,539 (3.1% percentile) for all time with 177 births since 1974.
Nakai first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1974 . Birth data for Nakai is available in 34 out of the 50 years between 1974 and 2023 (32 years for boys and 23 years for girls). 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 Nakai has been given predominantly to boys, with 82.7% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 100.0% of babies named Nakai were boys. Interestingly, until around 1994, the name was more popular for girls (61.4% girls from 1974 to 1993), but since then it has been more commonly used for boys (84.6% boys from 1994 to 2023).
For boys, Nakai reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 5.3% percentile (ranked #881) with 29 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 29 births per million (ranked 5.3% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Nakai ranks #868 for boys (4.7% percentile) with 26 births per million, which is 91.0% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Nakai reached its peak popularity in 2008, achieving the 0.9% percentile (ranked #975) with 7 births per million. The name was most common in 2019, with 7 births per million (ranked 0.8% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2021.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Nakai".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Nakai.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Nakai", 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 Nakai.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Nakai. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 61.0% confident that Nakai is pronounced as nuh-KAI, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is nah-KAI, at 14.6% 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 Nakai? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Nakai. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Nakai, 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 N AH0 K AY1) 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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