girls:
176.3k births since 1886
#224 (96th percentile)
boys:
9.4k births since 1880
#1220 (73rd percentile)
overall:
185.7k births since 1880
#416 (95th percentile)
The name Sydney is the #416 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 185,662 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 94.6% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 94.6% of all names). For girls, it ranks #224 (96.1% percentile) for all time with 176,305 births since 1886. For boys, it ranks #1,220 (73.4% percentile) for all time with 9,357 births since 1880.
Sydney has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1886 for girls).
The name Sydney has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 95.0% of all recorded births being female. Interestingly, until around 1935, the name was more popular for boys (77.9% boys from 1880 to 1934), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (96.9% girls from 1935 to 2023).
For girls, Sydney reached its peak popularity in 2001, achieving the 97.5% percentile (ranked #23) with 4,866 births per million. The name was most common in 2000, with 5,132 births per million (ranked 97.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2003, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Sydney ranks #289 for girls (69.6% percentile) with 572 births per million, which is 11.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Sydney reached its peak popularity in 1916, achieving the 36.1% percentile (ranked #321) with 222 births per million. The name was most common in 1913, with 270 births per million (ranked 32.2% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2000, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Sydney ranks #879 for boys (3.5% percentile) with 20 births per million, which is 7.5% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sydney".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sydney.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sydney", 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 Sydney.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Sydney. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 91.9% confident that Sydney is pronounced as SIHD-nee, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is sihd-nee, at 8.1% 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 Sydney? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sydney. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sydney, 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 IH1 D N IY0) 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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