girls:
3.6k births since 1880
#2868 (50th percentile)
boys:
628.5k births since 1880
#50 (99th percentile)
overall:
632.1k births since 1880
#91 (99th percentile)
The name Walter is the #91 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 632,140 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 98.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 98.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #50 (98.9% percentile) for all time with 628,508 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #2,868 (49.8% percentile) for all time with 3,632 births since 1880.
Walter has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880
The name Walter has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.4% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Walter reached its peak popularity in 1919, achieving the 98.1% percentile (ranked #11) with 12,685 births per million. The name was most common in 1892, with 16,957 births per million (ranked 94.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2008, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Walter ranks #259 for boys (71.6% percentile) with 695 births per million, which is 4.1% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Walter reached its peak popularity in 1929, achieving the 16.1% percentile (ranked #497) with 86 births per million. The name was most common in 1881, with 111 births per million (ranked 2.8% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1995.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Walter".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Walter.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Walter", 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 Walter.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Walter. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 87.5% confident that Walter is pronounced as WAWL-ter, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is WAW-ter, at 12.5% 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 Walter? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Walter. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Walter, 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 W AO1 L T ER0) 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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