girls:
1.9k births since 1887
#3865 (32nd percentile)
boys:
585.7k births since 1880
#55 (99th percentile)
overall:
587.7k births since 1880
#105 (99th percentile)
The name Peter is the #105 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 587,656 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #55 (98.8% percentile) for all time with 585,713 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,865 (32.4% percentile) for all time with 1,943 births since 1887.
Peter has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1887 for girls).
The name Peter has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Peter reached its peak popularity in 1955, achieving the 94.7% percentile (ranked #35) with 5,265 births per million. The name was most common in 1957, with 5,300 births per million (ranked 94.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2014, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Peter ranks #207 for boys (77.4% percentile) with 949 births per million, which is 17.9% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Peter reached its peak popularity in 1980, achieving the 5.4% percentile (ranked #743) with 26 births per million. The name was most common in 1887, with 39 births per million (ranked 0.4% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Peter".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Peter.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Peter", 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 Peter.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Peter. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Peter is pronounced as PEE-ter, 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 Peter? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Peter. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Peter, 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 IY1 T ER0) 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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