girls:
116 births since 1913
#5600 (2nd percentile)
boys:
3.9k births since 1884
#1986 (57th percentile)
overall:
4k births since 1884
#4342 (44th percentile)
The name Willy is the #4,342 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 4,001 recorded births since 1884. This represents the 43.9% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 43.9% of all names). For boys, it ranks #1,986 (56.7% percentile) for all time with 3,885 births since 1884. For girls, it ranks #5,600 (2.0% percentile) for all time with 116 births since 1913.
Willy first appeared in U.S. birth records in 1884 (1884 for boys and 1913 for girls). Birth data for Willy is available in 119 out of the 140 years between 1884 and 2023 (119 years for boys and 19 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 Willy has been given almost exclusively to boys, with 97.1% of all recorded births being male.
For boys, Willy reached its peak popularity in 1993, achieving the 8.3% percentile (ranked #705) with 33 births per million. The name was most common in 1906, with 56 births per million (ranked 1.3% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2019, the popularity of this name for boys has been increasing. Currently, Willy ranks #897 for boys (1.5% percentile) with 10 births per million, which is 18.7% of its peak share of births.
For girls, Willy reached its peak popularity in 1947, achieving the 0.7% percentile (ranked #680) with 6 births per million. The name was most common in 1913, with 9 births per million (ranked 0.2% percentile). There have been no recorded female births with this name since 1973.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Willy".
These names exclude other spelling variations of Willie. View all variations of Willie.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Willy", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. This list excludes the 6 other name spellings that we've determined are also variations of "Willie" based on shared pronunciations. Click here for more details on names that are pronounced like Willie..
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Willy. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Willy is pronounced as WIH-lee, 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 Willy? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Willy. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Willy, 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 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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