girls:
24.1k births since 1950
#916 (84th percentile)
boys:
148 births since 1984
#4438 (3rd percentile)
overall:
24.2k births since 1950
#1631 (79th percentile)
The name Paola is the #1,631 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 24,231 recorded births since 1950. This represents the 78.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 78.9% of all names). For girls, it ranks #916 (84.0% percentile) for all time with 24,083 births since 1950. For boys, it ranks #4,438 (3.2% percentile) for all time with 148 births since 1984.
Paola first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1950 (1950 for girls and 1984 for boys). Birth data for Paola is available in 70 out of the 74 years between 1950 and 2023 (70 years for girls and 19 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 Paola has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.4% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Paola reached its peak popularity in 2006, achieving the 69.7% percentile (ranked #293) with 521 births per million. The name was most common in 1999, with 528 births per million (ranked 67.7% percentile). Despite a low point in 2004, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for girls. Currently, Paola ranks #722 for girls (23.8% percentile) with 131 births per million, which is 24.9% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Paola reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 1.3% percentile (ranked #747) with 5 births per million. The name was most common in 1995, with 6 births per million (ranked 1.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2007.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Paola".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Paola.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Paola", 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 Paola.
Our model has identified 7 different pronunciations for the name Paola. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 35.0% confident that Paola is pronounced as POW-luh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is pah-OH-luh, at 30.0% 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 Paola? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Paola. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Paola, 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 AW1 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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