girls:
99.6k births since 1940
#370 (94th percentile)
boys:
269 births since 1975
#4317 (6th percentile)
overall:
99.9k births since 1940
#684 (91st percentile)
The name Sierra is the #684 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 99,863 recorded births since 1940. This represents the 91.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 91.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #370 (93.5% percentile) for all time with 99,594 births since 1940. For boys, it ranks #4,317 (5.8% percentile) for all time with 269 births since 1975.
Sierra first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1940 (1940 for girls and 1975 for boys). Birth data for Sierra is available in 80 out of the 84 years between 1940 and 2023 (80 years for girls and 29 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 Sierra has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Sierra reached its peak popularity in 1999, achieving the 94.6% percentile (ranked #49) with 2,936 births per million. The name was most common in 1998, with 3,013 births per million (ranked 94.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1999, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Sierra ranks #491 for girls (48.2% percentile) with 298 births per million, which is 9.9% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Sierra reached its peak popularity in 1994, achieving the 1.7% percentile (ranked #763) with 9 births per million. The name was most common in 1994, with 9 births per million (ranked 1.7% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2006.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sierra".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sierra.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sierra", 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 Sierra.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Sierra. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 58.7% confident that Sierra is pronounced as see-EH-ruh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is SEE-eh-ruh, at 23.9% confidence, with 3 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 Sierra? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sierra. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sierra, 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 IY0 EH1 R 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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