girls:
627 births since 1890
#5089 (11th percentile)
boys:
43.1k births since 1880
#539 (88th percentile)
overall:
43.7k births since 1880
#1175 (85th percentile)
The name Sylvester is the #1,175 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 43,721 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 84.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 84.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #539 (88.3% percentile) for all time with 43,094 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,089 (10.9% percentile) for all time with 627 births since 1890.
Sylvester has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1890 for girls).
The name Sylvester has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Sylvester reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 69.7% percentile (ranked #163) with 738 births per million. The name was most common in 1901, with 1,038 births per million (ranked 44.1% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Sylvester ranks #849 for boys (6.8% percentile) with 37 births per million, which is 3.5% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Sylvester reached its peak popularity in 1926, achieving the 3.6% percentile (ranked #582) with 22 births per million. The name was most common in 1904, with 38 births per million (ranked 1.7% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1981.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sylvester".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sylvester.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sylvester", 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 Sylvester.
Our model has identified 4 different pronunciations for the name Sylvester. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 62.0% confident that Sylvester is pronounced as sihl-VEH-ster, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is SIHL-VEH-ster, at 16.0% 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 Sylvester? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sylvester. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sylvester, 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 IH0 L V EH1 S T ER0) 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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