girls:
76 births since 1916
#5640 (1st percentile)
boys:
14.9k births since 1880
#956 (79th percentile)
overall:
15k births since 1880
#2140 (72nd percentile)
The name Ward is the #2,140 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 15,022 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 72.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 72.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #956 (79.2% percentile) for all time with 14,946 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,640 (1.3% percentile) for all time with 76 births since 1916.
Ward has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1916 for girls).
The name Ward has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.5% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 87.8% of babies named Ward were boys.
For boys, Ward reached its peak popularity in 1922, achieving the 45.9% percentile (ranked #296) with 287 births per million. The name was most common in 1899, with 417 births per million (ranked 20.3% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2011, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Ward ranks #873 for boys (4.2% percentile) with 23 births per million, which is 5.6% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Ward reached its peak popularity in 2019, achieving the 0.8% percentile (ranked #937) with 7 births per million. The name was most common in 2019, with 7 births per million (ranked 0.8% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Ward ranks #946 for girls (0.1% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 48.4% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Ward".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Ward.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Ward", 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 Ward.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Ward. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Ward is pronounced as word, which has 1 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 Ward? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Ward. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Ward, 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 R D) 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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