girls:
5.6k births since 1880
#2235 (61st percentile)
boys:
204.1k births since 1880
#179 (96th percentile)
overall:
209.6k births since 1880
#373 (95th percentile)
The name Ray is the #373 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 209,617 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 95.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #179 (96.1% percentile) for all time with 204,058 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #2,235 (60.9% percentile) for all time with 5,559 births since 1880.
Ray has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Ray has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 97.3% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 92.8% of babies named Ray were boys.
For boys, Ray reached its peak popularity in 1926, achieving the 89.8% percentile (ranked #57) with 2,976 births per million. The name was most common in 1896, with 3,301 births per million (ranked 78.9% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2018, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Ray ranks #600 for boys (34.2% percentile) with 182 births per million, which is 5.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Ray reached its peak popularity in 1918, achieving the 25.6% percentile (ranked #439) with 135 births per million. The name was most common in 1890, with 218 births per million (ranked 13.3% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2012, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Ray ranks #926 for girls (2.2% percentile) with 15 births per million, which is 6.8% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ray".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Ray.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ray", 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 Ray.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Ray. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Ray is pronounced as ray, which has 1 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 Ray? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ray. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ray, 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) 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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