girls:
19.3k births since 1897
#1057 (82nd percentile)
boys:
147 births since 1916
#4439 (3rd percentile)
overall:
19.4k births since 1897
#1843 (76th percentile)
The name Precious is the #1,843 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 19,415 recorded births since 1897. This represents the 76.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 76.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1,057 (81.5% percentile) for all time with 19,268 births since 1897. For boys, it ranks #4,439 (3.1% percentile) for all time with 147 births since 1916.
Precious first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1897 (1897 for girls and 1916 for boys). Birth data for Precious is available in 124 out of the 127 years between 1897 and 2023 (124 years for girls and 25 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 Precious has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.2% of all recorded births being female. In 2023, 92.0% of babies named Precious were girls.
For girls, Precious reached its peak popularity in 2001, achieving the 58.9% percentile (ranked #370) with 377 births per million. The name was most common in 1998, with 382 births per million (ranked 58.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2002, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Precious ranks #883 for girls (6.8% percentile) with 39 births per million, which is 10.3% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Precious reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 0.9% percentile (ranked #750) with 4 births per million. The name was most common in 1917, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.2% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Precious ranks #910 for boys (0.1% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 52.4% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Precious".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Precious.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Precious", 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 Precious.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Precious. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Precious is pronounced as PREH-shuhs, which has 2 syllables.
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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 R EH1 SH AH0 S) 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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