girls:
318 births since 1908
#5398 (6th percentile)
boys:
22.7k births since 1882
#761 (83rd percentile)
overall:
23k births since 1882
#1670 (78th percentile)
The name Raphael is the #1,670 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 23,003 recorded births since 1882. This represents the 78.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 78.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #761 (83.4% percentile) for all time with 22,685 births since 1882. For girls, it ranks #5,398 (5.5% percentile) for all time with 318 births since 1908.
Raphael first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1882 (1882 for boys and 1908 for girls). Birth data for Raphael is available in 137 out of the 142 years between 1882 and 2023 (137 years for boys and 45 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 Raphael has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Raphael reached its peak popularity in 2023, achieving the 54.8% percentile (ranked #412) with 371 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 371 births per million (ranked 54.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2003, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Raphael is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #412 (54.8% percentile) with 371 births per million.
For girls, Raphael reached its peak popularity in 1924, achieving the 1.0% percentile (ranked #604) with 8 births per million. The name was most common in 1908, with 17 births per million (ranked 0.3% 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 "Raphael".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Rafael. View all variations of Rafael.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Raphael", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 14 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Rafael" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Rafael..
Our model has identified 14 different pronunciations for the name Raphael. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 15.1% confident that Raphael is pronounced as RA-fee-uhl, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is RA-fay-ehl, at 15.1% 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 Raphael? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Raphael. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Raphael, 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 AE1 F IY0 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.
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