girls:
24 births since 1958
#5692 (0th percentile)
boys:
6k births since 1880
#1516 (67th percentile)
overall:
6.1k births since 1880
#3482 (55th percentile)
The name Williams is the #3,482 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 6,057 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 55.0% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 55.0% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1,516 (66.9% percentile) for all time with 6,033 births since 1880. For girls, it ranks #5,692 (0.4% percentile) for all time with 24 births since 1958.
Williams has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for boys and since 1958 for girls).
The name Williams has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 99.6% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Williams reached its peak popularity in 1950, achieving the 13.5% percentile (ranked #519) with 47 births per million. The name was most common in 1892, with 122 births per million (ranked 4.9% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2017, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Williams ranks #859 for boys (5.7% percentile) with 31 births per million, which is 25.6% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Williams reached its peak popularity in 1974, achieving the 0.3% percentile (ranked #744) with 4 births per million. The name was most common in 1974, with 4 births per million (ranked 0.3% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1981.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Williams".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Williams.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Williams", 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 Williams.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Williams. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 82.1% confident that Williams is pronounced as WIHL-yuhmz, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is WIH-leemz, at 10.3% 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 Williams? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Williams. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Williams, 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 Y AH0 M Z) 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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