girls:
2.9k births since 1890
#3235 (43rd percentile)
boys:
803.3k births since 1880
#40 (99th percentile)
overall:
806.1k births since 1880
#65 (99th percentile)
The name Samuel is the #65 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 806,135 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.2% of all names). For boys, it ranks #40 (99.1% percentile) for all time with 803,262 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,235 (43.4% percentile) for all time with 2,873 births since 1890.
Samuel has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1890 for girls).
The name Samuel has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Samuel reached its peak popularity in 2022, achieving the 98.0% percentile (ranked #19) with 4,485 births per million. The name was most common in 1880, with 8,649 births per million (ranked 92.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2003, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Samuel ranks #20 for boys (97.9% percentile) with 4,354 births per million, which is 50.3% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Samuel reached its peak popularity in 1983, achieving the 7.5% percentile (ranked #717) with 35 births per million. The name was most common in 1983, with 35 births per million (ranked 7.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2020, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Samuel ranks #942 for girls (0.5% percentile) with 6 births per million, which is 16.2% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Samuel".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Samuel.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Samuel", 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 Samuel.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Samuel. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 54.3% confident that Samuel is pronounced as SA-myue-uhl, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is SA-myuel, at 32.6% 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 Samuel? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Samuel. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Samuel, 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 Y UW0 AH0 L) 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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