girls:
3.1k births since 1890
#3136 (45th percentile)
boys:
236.9k births since 1880
#163 (96th percentile)
overall:
240k births since 1880
#337 (96th percentile)
The name Wesley is the #337 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 240,004 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 95.7% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 95.7% of all names). For boys, it ranks #163 (96.5% percentile) for all time with 236,936 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #3,136 (45.1% percentile) for all time with 3,068 births since 1890.
Wesley has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1890 for girls).
The name Wesley has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.7% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Wesley reached its peak popularity in 2023, achieving the 92.7% percentile (ranked #67) with 2,479 births per million. The name was most common in 1977, with 2,516 births per million (ranked 90.6% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2008, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Wesley is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #67 (92.7% percentile) with 2,479 births per million.
For girls, Wesley reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 13.7% percentile (ranked #808) with 74 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 74 births per million (ranked 13.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2009, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Wesley ranks #838 for girls (11.5% percentile) with 65 births per million, which is 87.8% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Wesley".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Wesley.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Wesley", 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 Wesley.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Wesley. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 70.5% confident that Wesley is pronounced as WEH-slee, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is WEHZ-lee, at 20.5% 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 Wesley? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Wesley. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Wesley, 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 S 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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