girls:
31.3k births since 1880
#797 (86th percentile)
boys:
24 births since 1929
#4562 (0th percentile)
overall:
31.4k births since 1880
#1435 (81st percentile)
The name Willa is the #1,435 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 31,362 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 81.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 81.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #797 (86.1% percentile) for all time with 31,338 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,562 (0.5% percentile) for all time with 24 births since 1929.
Willa has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1929 for boys).
The name Willa has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.9% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Willa reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 66.2% percentile (ranked #317) with 495 births per million. The name was most common in 2020, with 501 births per million (ranked 66.1% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 1991, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Willa ranks #392 for girls (58.7% percentile) with 410 births per million, which is 81.9% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Willa reached its peak popularity in 1929, achieving the 0.4% percentile (ranked #529) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1929, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.4% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1937.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Willa".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Willa.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Willa", 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 Willa.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Willa. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.5% confident that Willa is pronounced as WIH-luh, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is WEE-luh, at 9.5% 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 Willa? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Willa. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Willa, 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 AH0) 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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