girls:
55.6k births since 1890
#539 (91st percentile)
boys:
409 births since 1924
#4177 (9th percentile)
overall:
56k births since 1890
#1002 (87th percentile)
The name Willow is the #1,002 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 55,961 recorded births since 1890. This represents the 87.1% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 87.1% of all names). For girls, it ranks #539 (90.6% percentile) for all time with 55,552 births since 1890. For boys, it ranks #4,177 (8.9% percentile) for all time with 409 births since 1924.
Willow first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1890 (1890 for girls and 1924 for boys). Birth data for Willow is available in 119 out of the 134 years between 1890 and 2023 (119 years for girls and 29 years for boys). 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 Willow has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.3% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Willow reached its peak popularity in 2022, achieving the 96.2% percentile (ranked #37) with 2,816 births per million. The name was most common in 2021, with 2,894 births per million (ranked 95.9% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 1990, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Willow ranks #39 for girls (96.0% percentile) with 2,702 births per million, which is 93.4% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Willow reached its peak popularity in 2023, achieving the 4.5% percentile (ranked #870) with 25 births per million. The name was most common in 2023, with 25 births per million (ranked 4.5% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2008, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Willow is at or near its peak popularity for boys, ranked #870 (4.5% percentile) with 25 births per million.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Willow".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Willow.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Willow", 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 Willow.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Willow. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Willow is pronounced as WIH-loh, which has 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 Willow? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Willow. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Willow, 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 OW0) 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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