girls:
36 births since 2015
#5680 (1st percentile)
boys:
19 births since 1923
#4567 (0th percentile)
overall:
55 births since 1923
#7684 (1st percentile)
The name Wellesley is the #7,684 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 55 recorded births since 1923. This represents the 0.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 0.7% of all names). For girls, it ranks #5,680 (0.6% percentile) for all time with 36 births since 2015. For boys, it ranks #4,567 (0.3% percentile) for all time with 19 births since 1923.
Wellesley first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1923 (1923 for boys and 2015 for girls). Birth data for Wellesley is available in 7 out of the 101 years between 1923 and 2023 (6 years for girls and 3 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 Wellesley has been given to both genders, with a slight preference for girls (65.5% of all recorded births). In 2023, 100.0% of babies named Wellesley were girls. Interestingly, until around 2015, the name was more popular for boys (100.0% boys from 1923 to 2014), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (73.5% girls from 2015 to 2023).
For girls, Wellesley reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 0.3% percentile (ranked #933) with 4 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 4 births per million (ranked 0.3% percentile). In recent years, the popularity of this name for girls has remained relatively stable. Currently, Wellesley ranks #946 for girls (0.1% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 76.8% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Wellesley reached its peak popularity in 2020, achieving the 0.3% percentile (ranked #898) with 4 births per million. The name was most common in 1923, with 5 births per million (ranked 0.2% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2020.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Wellesley".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Wellesley.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Wellesley", 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 Wellesley.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Wellesley. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 82.2% confident that Wellesley is pronounced as WEHLZ-lee, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is WEHL-slee, at 17.8% 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 Wellesley? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Wellesley. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Wellesley, 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 EH1 L Z L 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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