girls:
99.9k births since 1882
#369 (94th percentile)
boys:
384 births since 1915
#4202 (8th percentile)
overall:
100.3k births since 1882
#682 (91st percentile)
The name Penny is the #682 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 100,251 recorded births since 1882. This represents the 91.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 91.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #369 (93.6% percentile) for all time with 99,867 births since 1882. For boys, it ranks #4,202 (8.3% percentile) for all time with 384 births since 1915.
Penny first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1882 (1882 for girls and 1915 for boys). Birth data for Penny is available in 129 out of the 142 years between 1882 and 2023 (129 years for girls and 41 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 Penny has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Penny reached its peak popularity in 1963, achieving the 89.0% percentile (ranked #86) with 2,579 births per million. The name was most common in 1963, with 2,579 births per million (ranked 89.0% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2005, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Penny ranks #554 for girls (41.5% percentile) with 246 births per million, which is 9.6% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Penny reached its peak popularity in 1962, achieving the 3.2% percentile (ranked #637) with 12 births per million. The name was most common in 1962, with 12 births per million (ranked 3.2% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1974.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Penny".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Penny.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Penny", 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 Penny.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Penny. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Penny is pronounced as PEH-nee, which has 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 Penny? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Penny. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Penny, 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 EH1 N 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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