boys:
994 births since 1962
#3598 (21st percentile)
overall:
994 births since 1962
#6745 (13th percentile)
The name Nicholai is the #6,745 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 994 recorded births since 1962. This represents the 12.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 12.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #3,598 (21.5% percentile) for all time with 994 births since 1962.
Nicholai first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1962 (first recorded for boys in 1962). Birth data for Nicholai is available in 48 out of the 62 years between 1962 and 2023. 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.
For boys, Nicholai reached its peak popularity in 2010, achieving the 5.1% percentile (ranked #835) with 24 births per million. The name was most common in 2017, with 26 births per million (ranked 5.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2017, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Nicholai ranks #904 for boys (0.8% percentile) with 7 births per million, which is 25.4% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Nicholai".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Nikolai. View all variations of Nikolai.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Nicholai", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 15 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Nikolai" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Nikolai..
Our model has identified 5 different pronunciations for the name Nicholai. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 47.6% confident that Nicholai is pronounced as NIH-kuh-lai, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is NIH-kuh-LAI, at 28.6% 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 Nicholai? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Nicholai. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Nicholai, 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 IH1 K AH0 L AY0) 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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