girls:
102 births since 1993
#5614 (2nd percentile)
boys:
3.5k births since 1886
#2110 (54th percentile)
overall:
3.6k births since 1886
#4561 (41st percentile)
The name Sylvan is the #4,561 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 3,603 recorded births since 1886. This represents the 41.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 41.1% of all names). For boys, it ranks #2,110 (54.0% percentile) for all time with 3,501 births since 1886. For girls, it ranks #5,614 (1.8% percentile) for all time with 102 births since 1993.
Sylvan first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1886 (1886 for boys and 1993 for girls). Birth data for Sylvan is available in 128 out of the 138 years between 1886 and 2023 (128 years for boys and 14 years for girls). 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 Sylvan has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 97.2% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 87.2% of babies named Sylvan were boys.
For boys, Sylvan reached its peak popularity in 1918, achieving the 18.3% percentile (ranked #434) with 98 births per million. The name was most common in 1912, with 117 births per million (ranked 12.3% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2009, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Sylvan ranks #841 for boys (7.7% percentile) with 41 births per million, which is 34.9% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Sylvan reached its peak popularity in 2023, achieving the 0.6% percentile (ranked #941) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2014, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Sylvan is at or near its peak popularity for girls, ranked #941 (0.6% percentile) with 6 births per million.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sylvan".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sylvan.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sylvan", 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 Sylvan.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Sylvan. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Sylvan is pronounced as SIHL-vuhn, which has 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 Sylvan? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sylvan. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sylvan, 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 L 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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