girls:
16k births since 1880
#1186 (79th percentile)
boys:
5 births since 1932
#4581 (0th percentile)
overall:
16k births since 1880
#2048 (74th percentile)
The name Zelda is the #2,048 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 16,031 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 73.5% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 73.5% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1,186 (79.3% percentile) for all time with 16,026 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,581 (0.0% percentile) for all time with 5 births since 1932.
Zelda has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1932 for boys). Birth data for Zelda is available in 142 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (142 years for girls and 1 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 Zelda has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 100.0% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Zelda reached its peak popularity in 2020, achieving the 49.1% percentile (ranked #479) with 298 births per million. The name was most common in 2020, with 298 births per million (ranked 49.1% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 1997, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Zelda ranks #574 for girls (39.4% percentile) with 229 births per million, which is 77.0% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Zelda reached its peak popularity in 1932, achieving the 0.0% percentile (ranked #530) with 5 births per million. The name was most common in 1932, with 5 births per million (ranked 0.0% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1932.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Zelda".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Zelda.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Zelda", 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 Zelda.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Zelda. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Zelda is pronounced as ZEHL-duh, 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 Zelda? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Zelda. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Zelda, 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 EH1 L D AH0) 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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