girls:
385 births since 1916
#5331 (7th percentile)
boys:
104.3k births since 1880
#297 (94th percentile)
overall:
104.7k births since 1880
#653 (92nd percentile)
The name Neil is the #653 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 104,684 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 91.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 91.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #297 (93.5% percentile) for all time with 104,299 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,331 (6.7% percentile) for all time with 385 births since 1916.
Neil has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1916 for girls).
The name Neil has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Neil reached its peak popularity in 1978, achieving the 77.0% percentile (ranked #156) with 894 births per million. The name was most common in 1933, with 977 births per million (ranked 71.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2019, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Neil ranks #622 for boys (31.8% percentile) with 165 births per million, which is 16.9% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Neil reached its peak popularity in 1970, achieving the 1.2% percentile (ranked #764) with 8 births per million. The name was most common in 1933, with 8 births per million (ranked 0.5% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1990.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Neil".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Neil.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Neil", 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 Neil.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Neil. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Neil is pronounced as neel, which has 1 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 Neil? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Neil. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Neil, 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 IY1 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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