girls:
26.8k births since 1959
#871 (85th percentile)
boys:
956.6k births since 1906
#31 (99th percentile)
overall:
983.4k births since 1906
#44 (99th percentile)
The name Ryan is the #44 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 983,422 recorded births since 1906. This represents the 99.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #31 (99.3% percentile) for all time with 956,600 births since 1906. For girls, it ranks #871 (84.8% percentile) for all time with 26,822 births since 1959.
Ryan first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1906 (1906 for boys and 1959 for girls). Birth data for Ryan is available in 112 out of the 118 years between 1906 and 2023 (112 years for boys and 62 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 Ryan has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 97.3% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 90.3% of babies named Ryan were boys.
For boys, Ryan reached its peak popularity in 2004, achieving the 98.7% percentile (ranked #12) with 9,225 births per million. The name was most common in 1985, with 15,543 births per million (ranked 98.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1987, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Ryan ranks #81 for boys (91.2% percentile) with 2,195 births per million, which is 14.1% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Ryan reached its peak popularity in 2018, achieving the 63.6% percentile (ranked #350) with 465 births per million. The name was most common in 2018, with 465 births per million (ranked 63.6% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Ryan ranks #554 for girls (41.5% percentile) with 246 births per million, which is 53.0% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ryan".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Ryan.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ryan", 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 Ryan.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Ryan. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 91.1% confident that Ryan is pronounced as RAI-uhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is REE-uhn, at 8.9% 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 Ryan? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ryan. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ryan, 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 AY1 AH0 N) 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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