girls:
594.9k births since 1895
#44 (99th percentile)
boys:
1.4k births since 1941
#3244 (29th percentile)
overall:
596.3k births since 1895
#99 (99th percentile)
The name Pamela is the #99 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 596,281 recorded births since 1895. This represents the 98.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.7% of all names). For girls, it ranks #44 (99.2% percentile) for all time with 594,895 births since 1895. For boys, it ranks #3,244 (29.2% percentile) for all time with 1,386 births since 1941.
Pamela first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1895 (1895 for girls and 1941 for boys). Birth data for Pamela is available in 118 out of the 129 years between 1895 and 2023 (118 years for girls and 55 years for boys). 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 Pamela has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.8% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Pamela reached its peak popularity in 1964, achieving the 98.7% percentile (ranked #11) with 10,128 births per million. The name was most common in 1954, with 13,744 births per million (ranked 98.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1983, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Pamela ranks #851 for girls (10.1% percentile) with 58 births per million, which is 0.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Pamela reached its peak popularity in 1963, achieving the 9.0% percentile (ranked #589) with 31 births per million. The name was most common in 1969, with 33 births per million (ranked 8.3% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2004.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Pamela".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Pamela.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Pamela", 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 Pamela.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Pamela. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 77.3% confident that Pamela is pronounced as PA-muh-luh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is puh-MEH-luh, at 22.7% 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 Pamela? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Pamela. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Pamela, 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 P AE1 M AH0 L AH0) 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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