girls:
76 births since 2000
#5640 (1st percentile)
boys:
218 births since 1915
#4368 (5th percentile)
overall:
294 births since 1915
#7445 (4th percentile)
The name Willoughby is the #7,445 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 294 recorded births since 1915. This represents the 3.8% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 3.8% of all names). For boys, it ranks #4,368 (4.7% percentile) for all time with 218 births since 1915. For girls, it ranks #5,640 (1.3% percentile) for all time with 76 births since 2000.
Willoughby first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1915 (1915 for boys and 2000 for girls). Birth data for Willoughby is available in 39 out of the 109 years between 1915 and 2023 (31 years for boys and 11 years for girls). 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.
The name Willoughby has been given predominantly to boys, with 74.1% of all recorded births being male. In 2023, 0.0% of babies named Willoughby were boys. Interestingly, until around 2000, the name was more popular for boys (100.0% boys from 1915 to 1999), but since then it has been more commonly used for girls (65.0% girls from 2000 to 2023).
For boys, Willoughby reached its peak popularity in 1923, achieving the 1.8% percentile (ranked #541) with 13 births per million. The name was most common in 1923, with 13 births per million (ranked 1.8% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2021.
For girls, Willoughby reached its peak popularity in 2021, achieving the 0.5% percentile (ranked #931) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 2020, with 6 births per million (ranked 0.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2019, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Willoughby ranks #945 for girls (0.2% percentile) with 4 births per million, which is 70.7% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Willoughby".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Willoughby.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Willoughby", 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 Willoughby.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Willoughby. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 78.9% confident that Willoughby is pronounced as WIH-luh-bee, which has 3 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is WIH-luh-gee-bee, at 21.1% confidence, with 4 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 Willoughby? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Willoughby. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Willoughby, 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 B 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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