girls:
243.2k births since 1880
#165 (97th percentile)
boys:
908 births since 1906
#3682 (20th percentile)
overall:
244.1k births since 1880
#326 (96th percentile)
The name Sylvia is the #326 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 244,069 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 95.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.8% of all names). For girls, it ranks #165 (97.1% percentile) for all time with 243,161 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,682 (19.7% percentile) for all time with 908 births since 1906.
Sylvia has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1906 for boys).
The name Sylvia has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Sylvia reached its peak popularity in 1937, achieving the 91.6% percentile (ranked #50) with 3,968 births per million. The name was most common in 1937, with 3,968 births per million (ranked 91.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2011, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Sylvia ranks #390 for girls (58.9% percentile) with 413 births per million, which is 10.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Sylvia reached its peak popularity in 1936, achieving the 3.7% percentile (ranked #500) with 23 births per million. The name was most common in 1907, with 38 births per million (ranked 0.4% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1992.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Sylvia".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Sylvia.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Sylvia", 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 Sylvia.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Sylvia. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.2% confident that Sylvia is pronounced as SIHL-vee-uh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is SIHL-vyuh, at 9.8% 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 Sylvia? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Sylvia. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Sylvia, 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 IY0 AH0) 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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