girls:
16.8k births since 1880
#1153 (80th percentile)
boys:
112 births since 1888
#4474 (2nd percentile)
overall:
16.9k births since 1880
#1985 (74th percentile)
The name Zelma is the #1,985 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 16,902 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 74.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 74.4% of all names). For girls, it ranks #1,153 (79.8% percentile) for all time with 16,790 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,474 (2.4% percentile) for all time with 112 births since 1888.
Zelma has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1888 for boys). Birth data for Zelma is available in 137 out of the 144 years between 1880 and 2023 (137 years for girls and 17 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 Zelma has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.3% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Zelma reached its peak popularity in 1915, achieving the 53.9% percentile (ranked #258) with 476 births per million. The name was most common in 1904, with 677 births per million (ranked 43.7% percentile). Since reaching a low point around 2021, the popularity of this name for girls has been increasing. Currently, Zelma ranks #938 for girls (1.0% percentile) with 8 births per million, which is 1.2% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Zelma reached its peak popularity in 1921, achieving the 1.3% percentile (ranked #543) with 11 births per million. The name was most common in 1903, with 46 births per million (ranked 0.4% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 1944.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Zelma".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Zelma.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Zelma", 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 Zelma.
Our model found one way to pronounce the name Zelma. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 100.0% confident that Zelma is pronounced as ZEHL-muh, 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 Zelma? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Zelma. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Zelma, 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 M 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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