girls:
280.2k births since 1880
#139 (98th percentile)
boys:
913 births since 1917
#3677 (20th percentile)
overall:
281.1k births since 1880
#280 (96th percentile)
The name Paula is the #280 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 281,073 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 96.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.4% of all names). For girls, it ranks #139 (97.6% percentile) for all time with 280,160 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,677 (19.8% percentile) for all time with 913 births since 1917.
Paula has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1917 for boys).
The name Paula has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Paula reached its peak popularity in 1954, achieving the 94.9% percentile (ranked #38) with 4,865 births per million. The name was most common in 1963, with 5,105 births per million (ranked 94.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2017, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Paula ranks #575 for girls (39.3% percentile) with 229 births per million, which is 4.5% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Paula reached its peak popularity in 1963, achieving the 3.4% percentile (ranked #625) with 13 births per million. The name was most common in 1963, with 13 births per million (ranked 3.4% percentile). Despite a peak around 2019, the name has seen a recent rise in popularity for boys. Currently, Paula ranks #910 for boys (0.1% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 25.1% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Paula".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Paula.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Paula", 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 Paula.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Paula. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 88.4% confident that Paula is pronounced as PAW-luh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is POW-luh, at 11.6% 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 Paula? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Paula. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Paula, 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 AO1 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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