girls:
658 births since 1881
#5058 (11th percentile)
boys:
45.6k births since 1880
#528 (88th percentile)
overall:
46.3k births since 1880
#1133 (85th percentile)
The name Will is the #1,133 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 46,288 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 85.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 85.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #528 (88.5% percentile) for all time with 45,630 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,058 (11.5% percentile) for all time with 658 births since 1881.
Will has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1881 for girls).
The name Will has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 98.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Will reached its peak popularity in 1882, achieving the 88.3% percentile (ranked #25) with 5,458 births per million. The name was most common in 1882, with 5,458 births per million (ranked 88.3% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2007, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Will ranks #731 for boys (19.8% percentile) with 101 births per million, which is 1.9% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Will reached its peak popularity in 1922, achieving the 3.2% percentile (ranked #578) with 19 births per million. The name was most common in 1881, with 71 births per million (ranked 0.9% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1978.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Will".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Will.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Will", 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 Will.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Will. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 86.7% confident that Will is pronounced as wihl, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is wuhl, at 13.3% confidence, with 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 Will? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Will. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Will, 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) 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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