girls:
2.9k births since 1912
#3204 (44th percentile)
boys:
863k births since 1880
#36 (99th percentile)
overall:
865.9k births since 1880
#57 (99th percentile)
The name Stephen is the #57 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 865,933 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 99.3% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 99.3% of all names). For boys, it ranks #36 (99.2% percentile) for all time with 863,003 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,204 (43.9% percentile) for all time with 2,930 births since 1912.
Stephen has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1912 for girls).
The name Stephen has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Stephen reached its peak popularity in 1951, achieving the 97.0% percentile (ranked #19) with 11,755 births per million. The name was most common in 1951, with 11,755 births per million (ranked 97.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 1987, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Stephen ranks #341 for boys (62.6% percentile) with 487 births per million, which is 4.1% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Stephen reached its peak popularity in 1985, achieving the 11.5% percentile (ranked #708) with 53 births per million. The name was most common in 1985, with 53 births per million (ranked 11.5% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 2007.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Stephen".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Steven. View all variations of Steven.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Stephen", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 11 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Steven" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Steven..
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Stephen. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 36.5% confident that Stephen is pronounced as STEE-vuhn, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is STEE-fuhn, at 25.0% 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 Stephen? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Stephen. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Stephen, 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 T IY1 V AH0 N) 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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