girls:
571.4k births since 1880
#50 (99th percentile)
boys:
1.8k births since 1899
#2944 (36th percentile)
overall:
573.2k births since 1880
#109 (99th percentile)
The name Rachel is the #109 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 573,153 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.6% of all names). For girls, it ranks #50 (99.1% percentile) for all time with 571,362 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #2,944 (35.8% percentile) for all time with 1,791 births since 1899.
Rachel has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1899 for boys).
The name Rachel has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Rachel reached its peak popularity in 1996, achieving the 99.1% percentile (ranked #9) with 8,407 births per million. The name was most common in 1985, with 8,861 births per million (ranked 98.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1996, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Rachel ranks #243 for girls (74.4% percentile) with 691 births per million, which is 7.8% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Rachel reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 13.9% percentile (ranked #652) with 51 births per million. The name was most common in 1989, with 51 births per million (ranked 13.9% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2018.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Rachel".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Rachel.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Rachel", 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 Rachel.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Rachel. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.0% confident that Rachel is pronounced as RAY-chuhl, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is RAY-kuhl, at 10.0% 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 Rachel? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Rachel. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Rachel, 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 R EY1 CH AH0 L) 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker