girls:
7.4k births since 1882
#1884 (67th percentile)
boys:
64 births since 2002
#4522 (1st percentile)
overall:
7.5k births since 1882
#3113 (60th percentile)
The name Nelly is the #3,113 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 7,513 recorded births since 1882. This represents the 59.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 59.8% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1,884 (67.0% percentile) for all time with 7,449 births since 1882. For boys, it ranks #4,522 (1.3% percentile) for all time with 64 births since 2002.
Nelly first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1882 (1882 for girls and 2002 for boys). Birth data for Nelly is available in 133 out of the 142 years between 1882 and 2023 (133 years for girls and 10 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 Nelly has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.1% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Nelly reached its peak popularity in 2007, achieving the 20.6% percentile (ranked #784) with 98 births per million. The name was most common in 2007, with 98 births per million (ranked 20.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Nelly ranks #810 for girls (14.5% percentile) with 81 births per million, which is 82.6% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Nelly reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 0.4% percentile (ranked #926) with 5 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 5 births per million (ranked 0.4% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Nelly ranks #911 for boys (0.0% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 56.8% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Nelly".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Nellie. View all variations of Nellie.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Nelly", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 8 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Nellie" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Nellie..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Nelly. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Nelly is pronounced as NEH-lee, which has 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 Nelly? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Nelly. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Nelly, 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 IY0) 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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