girls:
2.8k births since 1923
#3253 (43rd percentile)
boys:
9.1k births since 1880
#1234 (73rd percentile)
overall:
12k births since 1880
#2403 (69th percentile)
The name Raleigh is the #2,403 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 11,995 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 69.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 69.0% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1,234 (73.1% percentile) for all time with 9,149 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,253 (43.1% percentile) for all time with 2,846 births since 1923.
Raleigh has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1923 for girls).
The name Raleigh has been given predominantly to boys, with 76.3% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 35.4% of babies named Raleigh were boys. Interestingly, until around 2008, the name was more popular for boys (90.8% boys from 1880 to 2007), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (61.7% girls from 2008 to 2023).
For boys, Raleigh reached its peak popularity in 1921, achieving the 23.9% percentile (ranked #419) with 122 births per million. The name was most common in 1891, with 220 births per million (ranked 9.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Raleigh ranks #847 for boys (7.0% percentile) with 38 births per million, which is 17.2% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Raleigh reached its peak popularity in 2016, achieving the 17.3% percentile (ranked #792) with 88 births per million. The name was most common in 2016, with 88 births per million (ranked 17.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Raleigh ranks #826 for girls (12.8% percentile) with 72 births per million, which is 82.0% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Raleigh".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Raleigh.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Raleigh", 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 Raleigh.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Raleigh. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 50.0% confident that Raleigh is pronounced as RAH-lee, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is RAW-lee, at 34.1% 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 Raleigh? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Raleigh. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Raleigh, 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 AA1 L IY0) 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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