girls:
404.3k births since 1880
#89 (98th percentile)
boys:
1.2k births since 1895
#3389 (26th percentile)
overall:
405.5k births since 1880
#177 (98th percentile)
The name Theresa is the #177 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 405,541 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 97.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 97.7% of all names). For girls, it ranks #89 (98.5% percentile) for all time with 404,323 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #3,389 (26.1% percentile) for all time with 1,218 births since 1895.
Theresa has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1895 for boys).
The name Theresa has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Theresa reached its peak popularity in 1956, achieving the 95.8% percentile (ranked #32) with 5,264 births per million. The name was most common in 1961, with 5,759 births per million (ranked 95.7% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2018, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Theresa ranks #830 for girls (12.4% percentile) with 70 births per million, which is 1.2% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Theresa reached its peak popularity in 1963, achieving the 5.6% percentile (ranked #611) with 20 births per million. The name was most common in 1895, with 39 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1991.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Theresa".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Teresa. View all variations of Teresa.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Theresa", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 16 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Teresa" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Teresa..
Our model has identified 11 different pronunciations for the name Theresa. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 17.2% confident that Theresa is pronounced as ther-EE-suh, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is ter-EE-suh, at 15.5% 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 Theresa? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Theresa. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Theresa, 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 ER0 IY1 S 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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