girls:
225.4k births since 1880
#176 (97th percentile)
boys:
1.1k births since 1896
#3461 (24th percentile)
overall:
226.5k births since 1880
#352 (95th percentile)
The name Thelma is the #352 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 226,536 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 95.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #176 (96.9% percentile) for all time with 225,394 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,461 (24.5% percentile) for all time with 1,142 births since 1896.
Thelma has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1896 for boys). Birth data for Thelma is available in 141 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (141 years for girls and 60 years for boys). 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 Thelma has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.5% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Thelma reached its peak popularity in 1921, achieving the 95.2% percentile (ranked #30) with 6,126 births per million. The name was most common in 1911, with 7,166 births per million (ranked 93.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2014, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Thelma ranks #930 for girls (1.8% percentile) with 13 births per million, which is 0.2% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Thelma reached its peak popularity in 1918, achieving the 7.4% percentile (ranked #492) with 42 births per million. The name was most common in 1906, with 83 births per million (ranked 2.9% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1969.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Thelma".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Thelma.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Thelma", 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 Thelma.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Thelma. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 80.5% confident that Thelma is pronounced as THEHL-muh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is TEHL-muh, at 19.5% 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 Thelma? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Thelma. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Thelma, 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 TH EH1 L M 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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