girls:
1.2k births since 1915
#4555 (20th percentile)
boys:
282k births since 1880
#134 (97th percentile)
overall:
283.1k births since 1880
#276 (96th percentile)
The name Nathaniel is the #276 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 283,133 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #134 (97.1% percentile) for all time with 281,972 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #4,555 (20.3% percentile) for all time with 1,161 births since 1915.
Nathaniel has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1915 for girls).
The name Nathaniel has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Nathaniel reached its peak popularity in 2001, achieving the 92.8% percentile (ranked #60) with 3,213 births per million. The name was most common in 2002, with 3,297 births per million (ranked 92.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2003, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Nathaniel ranks #140 for boys (84.7% percentile) with 1,369 births per million, which is 41.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Nathaniel reached its peak popularity in 1986, achieving the 3.9% percentile (ranked #782) with 20 births per million. The name was most common in 1986, with 20 births per million (ranked 3.9% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Nathaniel".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Nathaniel.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Nathaniel", 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 Nathaniel.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Nathaniel. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 74.3% confident that Nathaniel is pronounced as nuh-THA-nyuhl, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is nay-THA-nyuhl, at 14.3% 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 Nathaniel? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Nathaniel. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Nathaniel, 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 TH AE1 N Y 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