girls:
26.8k births since 1880
#873 (85th percentile)
boys:
321 births since 1908
#4265 (7th percentile)
overall:
27.1k births since 1880
#1545 (80th percentile)
The name Selma is the #1,545 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 27,080 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 80.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 80.0% of all names). For girls, it ranks #873 (84.7% percentile) for all time with 26,759 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,265 (6.9% percentile) for all time with 321 births since 1908.
Selma has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1908 for boys).
The name Selma has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 98.8% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Selma reached its peak popularity in 1917, achieving the 64.1% percentile (ranked #208) with 699 births per million. The name was most common in 1891, with 1,048 births per million (ranked 49.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2017, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Selma ranks #878 for girls (7.3% percentile) with 42 births per million, which is 4.0% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Selma reached its peak popularity in 1914, achieving the 2.0% percentile (ranked #447) with 20 births per million. The name was most common in 1909, with 34 births per million (ranked 0.4% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1961.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Selma".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Selma.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Selma", 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 Selma.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Selma. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.0% confident that Selma is pronounced as SEHL-muh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is sehl-muh, at 10.0% 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 Selma? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Selma. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Selma, 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 EH1 L M 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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