boys:
10.1k births since 1960
#1166 (75th percentile)
overall:
10.1k births since 1960
#2663 (66th percentile)
The name Nikolai is the #2,663 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 10,059 recorded births since 1960. This represents the 65.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 65.6% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1,166 (74.6% percentile) for all time with 10,059 births since 1960.
Nikolai first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1960 (first recorded for boys in 1960). Birth data for Nikolai is available in 61 out of the 64 years between 1960 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, Nikolai reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 52.6% percentile (ranked #441) with 332 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 332 births per million (ranked 52.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2019, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Nikolai ranks #516 for boys (43.4% percentile) with 254 births per million, which is 76.7% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Nikolai".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Nikolai.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Nikolai", 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 Nikolai.
Our model has identified 7 different pronunciations for the name Nikolai. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 26.7% confident that Nikolai is pronounced as NIH-kuh-LAI, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is NIH-kuh-lai, at 25.0% 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 Nikolai? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Nikolai. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Nikolai, 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 AY1) 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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