boys:
2.5k births since 1880
#2517 (45th percentile)
overall:
2.5k births since 1880
#5324 (31st percentile)
The name Olaf is the #5,324 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 2,518 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 31.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 31.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #2,517 (45.1% percentile) for all time with 2,518 births since 1880.
Olaf has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 Birth data for Olaf is available in 143 out of the 144 years between 1880 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, Olaf reached its peak popularity in 1916, achieving the 14.8% percentile (ranked #428) with 86 births per million. The name was most common in 1885, with 181 births per million (ranked 7.6% percentile). Despite a low point around 2013, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for boys. Currently, Olaf ranks #911 for boys (0.0% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 1.5% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Olaf".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Olaf.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Olaf", 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 Olaf.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Olaf. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 60.0% confident that Olaf is pronounced as OH-luhf, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is OH-lahf, at 32.5% 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 Olaf? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Olaf. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Olaf, 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 OW1 L AH0 F) 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker