girls:
97.4k births since 1880
#378 (93rd percentile)
boys:
47 births since 2015
#4539 (1st percentile)
overall:
97.5k births since 1880
#695 (91st percentile)
The name Penelope is the #695 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 97,481 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 91.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 91.0% of all names). For girls, it ranks #378 (93.4% percentile) for all time with 97,434 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,539 (1.0% percentile) for all time with 47 births since 2015.
Penelope has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 2015 for boys). Birth data for Penelope is available in 130 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (130 years for girls and 7 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 Penelope has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 100.0% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Penelope reached its peak popularity in 2022, achieving the 97.9% percentile (ranked #21) with 3,580 births per million. The name was most common in 2019, with 3,669 births per million (ranked 97.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 1992, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Penelope ranks #22 for girls (97.8% percentile) with 3,454 births per million, which is 94.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Penelope reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 0.5% percentile (ranked #925) with 5 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 5 births per million (ranked 0.5% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Penelope".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Penelope.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Penelope", 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 Penelope.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Penelope. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 88.9% confident that Penelope is pronounced as puh-NEH-luh-pee, which has 4 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is PEH-nuh-loh-pee, at 11.1% confidence, with 4 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 Penelope? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Penelope. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Penelope, 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 AH0 N EH1 L AH0 P IY0) 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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