girls:
9.5k births since 1886
#1655 (71st percentile)
boys:
2.6M births since 1880
#8 (100th percentile)
overall:
2.6M births since 1880
#9 (100th percentile)
The name Richard is the #9 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 2,583,933 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #8 (99.8% percentile) for all time with 2,574,402 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #1,655 (71.0% percentile) for all time with 9,531 births since 1886.
Richard has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1886 for girls).
The name Richard has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Richard reached its peak popularity in 1947, achieving the 99.3% percentile (ranked #5) with 31,511 births per million. The name was most common in 1946, with 35,670 births per million (ranked 99.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1967, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Richard ranks #218 for boys (76.2% percentile) with 895 births per million, which is 2.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Richard reached its peak popularity in 1929, achieving the 31.0% percentile (ranked #409) with 173 births per million. The name was most common in 1929, with 173 births per million (ranked 31.0% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2022.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Richard".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Richard.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Richard", 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 Richard.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Richard. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Richard is pronounced as RIH-cherd, which has 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 Richard? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Richard. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Richard, 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 IH1 CH ER0 D) 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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