girls:
14.5k births since 1889
#1278 (78th percentile)
overall:
14.5k births since 1889
#2178 (72nd percentile)
The name Tess is the #2,178 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 14,539 recorded births since 1889. This represents the 71.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 71.9% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1,278 (77.6% percentile) for all time with 14,539 births since 1889.
Tess first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1889 (first recorded for girls in 1889). Birth data for Tess is available in 121 out of the 135 years between 1889 and 2023. 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.
For girls, Tess reached its peak popularity in 1992, achieving the 51.5% percentile (ranked #417) with 264 births per million. The name was most common in 1993, with 266 births per million (ranked 50.5% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2003, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Tess ranks #835 for girls (11.8% percentile) with 67 births per million, which is 25.2% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Tess".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Tess.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Tess", 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 Tess.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Tess. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Tess is pronounced as tehs, which has 1 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 Tess? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Tess. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Tess, 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 T EH1 S) 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.
© 2025 NamePlay.org
Made with ❤️ by Aaron J Becker