girls:
592.7k births since 1937
#46 (99th percentile)
boys:
2k births since 1961
#2834 (38th percentile)
overall:
594.7k births since 1937
#101 (99th percentile)
The name Nicole is the #101 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 594,682 recorded births since 1937. This represents the 98.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.7% of all names). For girls, it ranks #46 (99.2% percentile) for all time with 592,717 births since 1937. For boys, it ranks #2,834 (38.2% percentile) for all time with 1,965 births since 1961.
Nicole first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1937 (1937 for girls and 1961 for boys).
The name Nicole has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Nicole reached its peak popularity in 1982, achieving the 99.4% percentile (ranked #6) with 11,964 births per million. The name was most common in 1983, with 12,516 births per million (ranked 99.2% percentile). Despite a low point in 2012, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for girls. Currently, Nicole ranks #308 for girls (67.5% percentile) with 537 births per million, which is 4.3% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Nicole reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 14.0% percentile (ranked #651) with 51 births per million. The name was most common in 1989, with 51 births per million (ranked 14.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2019.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Nicole".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Nicole.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Nicole", 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 Nicole.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Nicole. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.7% confident that Nicole is pronounced as nih-KOHL, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is NIH-kohl, at 9.3% confidence, with 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 Nicole? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Nicole. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Nicole, 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 IH0 K OW1 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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