girls:
269k births since 1884
#147 (97th percentile)
boys:
693 births since 1936
#3894 (15th percentile)
overall:
269.7k births since 1884
#292 (96th percentile)
The name Valerie is the #292 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 269,690 recorded births since 1884. This represents the 96.2% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.2% of all names). For girls, it ranks #147 (97.4% percentile) for all time with 268,997 births since 1884. For boys, it ranks #3,894 (15.0% percentile) for all time with 693 births since 1936.
Valerie first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1884 (1884 for girls and 1936 for boys). Birth data for Valerie is available in 138 out of the 140 years between 1884 and 2023 (138 years for girls and 55 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 Valerie has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.7% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Valerie reached its peak popularity in 1959, achieving the 92.3% percentile (ranked #60) with 3,515 births per million. The name was most common in 1959, with 3,515 births per million (ranked 92.3% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2018, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Valerie ranks #141 for girls (85.2% percentile) with 1,111 births per million, which is 31.6% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Valerie reached its peak popularity in 1980, achieving the 3.1% percentile (ranked #660) with 14 births per million. The name was most common in 1980, with 14 births per million (ranked 3.1% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2005.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Valerie".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Valerie.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Valerie", 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 Valerie.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Valerie. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 88.6% confident that Valerie is pronounced as VA-ler-ee, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is VA-ler-EE, at 11.4% 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 Valerie? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Valerie. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Valerie, 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 V AE1 L ER0 IY0) 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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