girls:
179 births since 1932
#5537 (3rd percentile)
boys:
97.5k births since 1882
#310 (93rd percentile)
overall:
97.7k births since 1882
#693 (91st percentile)
The name Nicolas is the #693 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 97,683 recorded births since 1882. This represents the 91.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 91.1% of all names). For boys, it ranks #310 (93.3% percentile) for all time with 97,504 births since 1882. For girls, it ranks #5,537 (3.1% percentile) for all time with 179 births since 1932.
Nicolas first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1882 (1882 for boys and 1932 for girls). Birth data for Nicolas is available in 127 out of the 142 years between 1882 and 2023 (127 years for boys and 23 years for girls). 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 Nicolas has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.8% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Nicolas reached its peak popularity in 2005, achieving the 84.5% percentile (ranked #136) with 1,394 births per million. The name was most common in 1998, with 1,440 births per million (ranked 83.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2017, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Nicolas ranks #190 for boys (79.2% percentile) with 1,030 births per million, which is 71.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Nicolas reached its peak popularity in 1988, achieving the 1.1% percentile (ranked #799) with 7 births per million. The name was most common in 1988, with 7 births per million (ranked 1.1% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2017.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Nicolas".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Nicholas. View all variations of Nicholas.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Nicolas", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 69 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Nicholas" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Nicholas..
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Nicolas. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 53.1% confident that Nicolas is pronounced as NIH-kuh-luhs, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is nih-KOH-luhs, 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 Nicolas? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Nicolas. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Nicolas, 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 AH0 S) 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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