girls:
3.3k births since 1913
#3021 (47th percentile)
boys:
35.6k births since 1880
#603 (87th percentile)
overall:
38.9k births since 1880
#1263 (84th percentile)
The name Sterling is the #1,263 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 38,915 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 83.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 83.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #603 (86.9% percentile) for all time with 35,631 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,021 (47.1% percentile) for all time with 3,284 births since 1913.
Sterling has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1913 for girls).
The name Sterling has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 91.6% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 81.5% of babies named Sterling were boys.
For boys, Sterling reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 60.8% percentile (ranked #365) with 449 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 449 births per million (ranked 60.8% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2009, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Sterling is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #373 (59.1% percentile) with 431 births per million.
For girls, Sterling reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 18.9% percentile (ranked #759) with 102 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 102 births per million (ranked 18.4% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2009, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Sterling is at or near its peak popularity for girls, ranked #773 (18.4% percentile) with 102 births per million.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sterling".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sterling.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sterling", 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 Sterling.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Sterling. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 85.0% confident that Sterling is pronounced as STER-lihng, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is STER-lihng, at 15.0% 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 Sterling? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sterling. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sterling, 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 ER1 L IH0 N G) 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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