girls:
1.5k births since 1888
#4214 (26th percentile)
boys:
126.4k births since 1880
#260 (94th percentile)
overall:
127.9k births since 1880
#581 (93rd percentile)
The name Sam is the #581 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 127,899 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 92.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 92.5% of all names). For boys, it ranks #260 (94.3% percentile) for all time with 126,366 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #4,214 (26.3% percentile) for all time with 1,533 births since 1888.
Sam has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1888 for girls).
The name Sam has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.8% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Sam reached its peak popularity in 1900, achieving the 86.9% percentile (ranked #34) with 5,064 births per million. The name was most common in 1900, with 5,064 births per million (ranked 86.9% percentile). Despite a low point around 2016, the name has seen a recent decline in popularity for boys. Currently, Sam ranks #549 for boys (39.8% percentile) with 220 births per million, which is 4.3% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Sam reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 5.2% percentile (ranked #563) with 31 births per million. The name was most common in 1913, with 35 births per million (ranked 3.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2014, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Sam ranks #941 for girls (0.6% percentile) with 6 births per million, which is 17.9% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sam".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sam.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sam", 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 Sam.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Sam. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Sam is pronounced as sam, 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 Sam? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sam. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sam, 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 S AE1 M) 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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