boys:
1.2k births since 1881
#3379 (26th percentile)
overall:
1.2k births since 1881
#6511 (16th percentile)
The name Wiliam is the #6,511 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 1,229 recorded births since 1881. This represents the 15.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 15.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #3,379 (26.3% percentile) for all time with 1,229 births since 1881.
Wiliam first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1881 (first recorded for boys in 1881). Birth data for Wiliam is available in 108 out of the 143 years between 1881 and 2023. 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.
For boys, Wiliam reached its peak popularity in 1982, achieving the 3.3% percentile (ranked #668) with 15 births per million. The name was most common in 1881, with 46 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2019, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Wiliam ranks #911 for boys (0.0% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 5.9% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Wiliam".
These names exclude other spelling variations of William. View all variations of William.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Wiliam", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 16 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "William" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like William..
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Wiliam. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 64.1% confident that Wiliam is pronounced as WIH-lee-uhm, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is WIHL-yuhm, at 28.2% 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 Wiliam? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Wiliam. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Wiliam, 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 IH1 L IY0 AH0 M) 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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