boys:
729 births since 1880
#3858 (16th percentile)
overall:
729 births since 1880
#7010 (9th percentile)
The name Rutherford is the #7,010 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 729 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 9.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 9.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #3,858 (15.8% percentile) for all time with 729 births since 1880.
Rutherford has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 Birth data for Rutherford is available in 75 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023. 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.
For boys, Rutherford reached its peak popularity in 1921, achieving the 3.6% percentile (ranked #530) with 22 births per million. The name was most common in 1880, with 68 births per million (ranked 1.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2016, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Rutherford ranks #905 for boys (0.7% percentile) with 6 births per million, which is 8.9% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Rutherford".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Rutherford.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Rutherford", 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 Rutherford.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Rutherford. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 43.2% confident that Rutherford is pronounced as RUH-ther-ferd, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is RUH-ther-ferd, at 32.4% 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 Rutherford? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Rutherford. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Rutherford, 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 AH1 DH ER0 F 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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