girls:
27.3k births since 1880
#861 (85th percentile)
boys:
98 births since 1900
#4488 (2nd percentile)
overall:
27.4k births since 1880
#1535 (80th percentile)
The name Nell is the #1,535 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 27,430 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 80.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 80.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #861 (84.9% percentile) for all time with 27,332 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,488 (2.1% percentile) for all time with 98 births since 1900.
Nell has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1900 for boys).
The name Nell has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Nell reached its peak popularity in 1917, achieving the 63.4% percentile (ranked #212) with 682 births per million. The name was most common in 1886, with 1,138 births per million (ranked 47.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2008, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Nell ranks #830 for girls (12.4% percentile) with 70 births per million, which is 6.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Nell reached its peak popularity in 1933, achieving the 0.8% percentile (ranked #517) with 9 births per million. The name was most common in 1900, with 31 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1977.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Nell".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Nell.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Nell", 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 Nell.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Nell. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Nell is pronounced as nehl, 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 Nell? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Nell. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Nell, 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 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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