girls:
569 births since 1923
#5147 (10th percentile)
boys:
86.1k births since 1880
#337 (93rd percentile)
overall:
86.7k births since 1880
#747 (90th percentile)
The name Rafael is the #747 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 86,661 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 90.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 90.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #337 (92.7% percentile) for all time with 86,092 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,147 (9.9% percentile) for all time with 569 births since 1923.
Rafael has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1923 for girls). Birth data for Rafael is available in 143 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (143 years for boys and 54 years for girls). 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 Rafael has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.3% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Rafael reached its peak popularity in 2022, achieving the 76.1% percentile (ranked #222) with 808 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 824 births per million (ranked 74.9% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2016, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Rafael is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #229 (74.9% percentile) with 824 births per million.
For girls, Rafael reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 2.4% percentile (ranked #805) with 11 births per million. The name was most common in 1977, with 13 births per million (ranked 2.2% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2009.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Rafael".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Rafael.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Rafael", 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 Rafael.
Our model has identified 28 different pronunciations for the name Rafael. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 12.1% confident that Rafael is pronounced as ruh-FUH-ehl, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is rah-fai-EHL, at 10.3% confidence, with 3 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 Rafael? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Rafael. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Rafael, 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 AH0 F AH1 EH0 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.
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