girls:
771 births since 1916
#4945 (13th percentile)
boys:
120.7k births since 1880
#270 (94th percentile)
overall:
121.5k births since 1880
#596 (92nd percentile)
The name Preston is the #596 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 121,517 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 92.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 92.3% of all names). For boys, it ranks #270 (94.1% percentile) for all time with 120,746 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #4,945 (13.5% percentile) for all time with 771 births since 1916.
Preston has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1916 for girls).
The name Preston has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.4% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Preston reached its peak popularity in 2007, achieving the 87.4% percentile (ranked #112) with 1,713 births per million. The name was most common in 2007, with 1,713 births per million (ranked 87.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2010, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Preston ranks #265 for boys (71.0% percentile) with 671 births per million, which is 39.1% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Preston reached its peak popularity in 2000, achieving the 2.1% percentile (ranked #878) with 12 births per million. The name was most common in 2016, with 12 births per million (ranked 2.0% percentile). Despite a peak around 2020, the name has seen a recent rise in popularity for girls. Currently, Preston ranks #935 for girls (1.3% percentile) with 10 births per million, which is 78.4% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Preston".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Preston.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Preston", 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 Preston.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Preston. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 87.5% confident that Preston is pronounced as PREH-stuhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is PREH-stihn, at 12.5% 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 Preston? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Preston. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Preston, 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 R EH1 S T AH0 N) 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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