boys:
32 births since 2009
#4554 (1st percentile)
overall:
32 births since 2009
#7707 (0th percentile)
The name Zao is the #7,707 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 32 recorded births since 2009. This represents the 0.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 0.4% of all names). For boys, it ranks #4,554 (0.6% percentile) for all time with 32 births since 2009.
Zao first appeared in U.S. birth records in 2009 (first recorded for boys in 2009). Birth data for Zao is available in 6 out of the 15 years between 2009 and 2023. 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.
For boys, Zao reached its peak popularity in 2011, achieving the 0.1% percentile (ranked #880) with 3 births per million. The name was most common in 2012, with 3 births per million (ranked 0.1% percentile). Since reaching a high point around 2020, the popularity of this name for boys has been declining. Currently, Zao ranks #911 for boys (0.0% percentile) with 3 births per million, which is 92.4% of its peak share of births.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Zao".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Zao.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Zao", 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 Zao.
Our model has identified 3 different pronunciations for the name Zao. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 40.6% confident that Zao is pronounced as zow, which has 1 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is ZAY-oh, at 34.4% 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 Zao? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Zao. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Zao, 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 Z AW1) 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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