girls:
431 births since 1913
#5285 (8th percentile)
boys:
79.1k births since 1880
#364 (92nd percentile)
overall:
79.5k births since 1880
#801 (90th percentile)
The name Nelson is the #801 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 79,499 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 89.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 89.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #364 (92.1% percentile) for all time with 79,068 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,285 (7.5% percentile) for all time with 431 births since 1913.
Nelson has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1913 for girls).
The name Nelson has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.5% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Nelson reached its peak popularity in 1942, achieving the 68.2% percentile (ranked #176) with 618 births per million. The name was most common in 1899, with 929 births per million (ranked 42.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Nelson ranks #617 for boys (32.3% percentile) with 169 births per million, which is 18.2% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Nelson reached its peak popularity in 1936, achieving the 1.4% percentile (ranked #561) with 12 births per million. The name was most common in 1936, with 12 births per million (ranked 1.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2012, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Nelson ranks #946 for girls (0.1% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 28.4% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Nelson".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Nelson.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Nelson", 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 Nelson.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Nelson. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Nelson is pronounced as NEHL-suhn, 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 Nelson? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Nelson. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Nelson, 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 S AH0 N) 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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