girls:
3.8k births since 1919
#2783 (51st percentile)
boys:
1.1M births since 1883
#26 (99th percentile)
overall:
1.1M births since 1883
#36 (100th percentile)
The name Ronald is the #36 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 1,085,096 recorded births since 1883. This represents the 99.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.5% of all names). For boys, it ranks #26 (99.5% percentile) for all time with 1,081,251 births since 1883. For girls, it ranks #2,783 (51.3% percentile) for all time with 3,845 births since 1919.
Ronald first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1883 (1883 for boys and 1919 for girls). Birth data for Ronald is available in 140 out of the 141 years between 1883 and 2023 (140 years for boys and 74 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 Ronald has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Ronald reached its peak popularity in 1943, achieving the 98.6% percentile (ranked #9) with 20,100 births per million. The name was most common in 1943, with 20,100 births per million (ranked 98.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1944, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Ronald ranks #519 for boys (43.1% percentile) with 249 births per million, which is 1.2% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Ronald reached its peak popularity in 1946, achieving the 13.5% percentile (ranked #570) with 58 births per million. The name was most common in 1946, with 58 births per million (ranked 13.5% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1999.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ronald".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Ronald.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ronald", 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 Ronald.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Ronald. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 83.7% confident that Ronald is pronounced as RAH-nuhld, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is ROH-nuhld, at 16.3% 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 Ronald? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ronald. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ronald, 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 N AH0 L 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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