girls:
4.3k births since 1896
#2605 (54th percentile)
boys:
40 births since 1913
#4546 (1st percentile)
overall:
4.4k births since 1896
#4138 (47th percentile)
The name Santa is the #4,138 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 4,373 recorded births since 1896. This represents the 46.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 46.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #2,605 (54.4% percentile) for all time with 4,333 births since 1896. For boys, it ranks #4,546 (0.8% percentile) for all time with 40 births since 1913.
Santa first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1896 (1896 for girls and 1913 for boys). Birth data for Santa is available in 124 out of the 128 years between 1896 and 2023 (124 years for girls and 7 years for boys). 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 Santa has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.1% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Santa reached its peak popularity in 1916, achieving the 14.5% percentile (ranked #490) with 81 births per million. The name was most common in 1915, with 83 births per million (ranked 14.2% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Santa ranks #940 for girls (0.7% percentile) with 7 births per million, which is 8.3% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Santa reached its peak popularity in 1926, achieving the 0.7% percentile (ranked #547) with 8 births per million. The name was most common in 1913, with 9 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1979.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Santa".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Santa.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Santa", 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 Santa.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Santa. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 83.7% confident that Santa is pronounced as SAN-tuh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is SA-nuh, 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 Santa? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Santa. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Santa, 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 N T AH0) 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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