girls:
259.8k births since 1900
#155 (97th percentile)
boys:
984 births since 1954
#3608 (21st percentile)
overall:
260.8k births since 1900
#304 (96th percentile)
The name Vanessa is the #304 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 260,829 recorded births since 1900. This represents the 96.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 96.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #155 (97.3% percentile) for all time with 259,845 births since 1900. For boys, it ranks #3,608 (21.3% percentile) for all time with 984 births since 1954.
Vanessa first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1900 (1900 for girls and 1954 for boys). Birth data for Vanessa is available in 107 out of the 124 years between 1900 and 2023 (107 years for girls and 57 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 Vanessa has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.6% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Vanessa reached its peak popularity in 1988, achieving the 95.0% percentile (ranked #41) with 3,908 births per million. The name was most common in 1985, with 4,097 births per million (ranked 94.9% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 1998, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Vanessa ranks #287 for girls (69.8% percentile) with 577 births per million, which is 14.1% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Vanessa reached its peak popularity in 1988, achieving the 9.2% percentile (ranked #659) with 36 births per million. The name was most common in 1988, with 36 births per million (ranked 9.2% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2014.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Vanessa".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Vanessa.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Vanessa", 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 Vanessa.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Vanessa. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Vanessa is pronounced as vuh-NEH-suh, which has 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 Vanessa? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Vanessa. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Vanessa, 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 AH0 N EH1 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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