Bethany

89,509 people in America carry this name — ranked #594 of 923.

Carried mostly by the Millennials.

Say it BEH thuh nee

3 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

B EH1 TH AH0 N IY0 — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 89,509 2020 Census
  • Rank #594 Familiar
  • As a surname 910 ranked #27,948 the other way round

What Bethany means and where it comes from

Reads literally as “the house of song; the house of affliction”.

Origins are a matter of scholarly argument rather than record, and a name can be traced more than one way. We state one reading and say where it came from.

Bethany through the years

99,013 babies were given this name since 1915. The busiest year was 1987, with 3,309 of them.

10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80s 90 00 10 20

Most people carrying it were born in the 1980s. It has been given less often of late.

Counted from Social Security card applications, so it covers births registered in the United States and leaves out names given to fewer than five babies in a year.

Middle names for Bethany

Three syllables already, so a short middle name keeps the whole from running long.

Better avoided

  • Bethany Brenda — same opening
  • Bethany Betty — same opening
  • Bethany Brooke — same opening

Chosen by sound from the pronouncing dictionary, then ordered by how often the name is given. None of it is a rule — the ear decides.

Going quiet

Bethany has more than halved in three decades. The people carrying it belong mostly to the Millennials.

Is Bethany used for boys or for girls?

0.1% men
89,417 women

As recorded on census returns, not as anyone thinks the name ought to be used.

The states where Bethany is most common

In Rhode Island the name is given 3.1 times as often as it is across the country.

  • Rhode Island ×3.1
  • Maine ×2.8
  • New Hampshire ×2.0
  • West Virginia ×2.0
  • Kentucky ×1.9

Measured against the state's own share of births since 1960, so a small state can lead a big one. Counted from Social Security card applications.

Who carries it today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 84.2%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 3.0%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 6.6%
  • Two or more races — 3.8%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 1.8%
  • American Indian and Alaska Native alone — 0.6%

Categories are how people answered the census — a fact about the bearers, not a property of the name. Conclusions are ours, not the Census Bureau’s.

Names with the same rhythm as Bethany

Nothing else in the file ends on the same sound — a rare thing, and useful if you want a first name nobody will echo.

Same rhythm — 3 syllables, stress on the first

Matched on phonemes, not spelling, so the lists follow the ear rather than the page.

How to spell Bethany

Bethany is how 18% of them spell it — 485,101 people answer to the sound.

Each spelling is its own census entry — the counts never overlap, so the shares are of the group, not of the country.

Names about as common

The nearest entries above and below by number of people.

Full names people carry

The census counts first names and surnames separately and never together, so these are estimates: how often the two halves would meet if they paired at random. They do not — names cluster by community — so read them as an order of magnitude, not a headcount.

Try it Name Matcher

Enter a surname and hear which first names sit well with it.

The matcher is confident about clashes — rhymes, doubled sounds, colliding stresses — because those are facts about the phonemes. Ordering the names that pass is a set of rules, not a verdict on beauty.

Open Name Matcher on its own page

Where this page gets its numbers

  • Counts, ranks and shares: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census tabulations of first and last names occurring 100 or more times. Percentages, bands and groupings are our own arithmetic — the conclusions are ours, not the Bureau’s.
  • Pronunciation, syllables and rhyme groups: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Carnegie Mellon University. The plain-English respelling is ours.
  • Origins and the forms a name takes in other languages: Charlotte Yonge, History of Christian Names, 1884 — a public-domain work. Scholarship has moved on since, so read it as one reading of a name, not the last word.

Below a hundred people we publish no figure at all — the same threshold the Census Bureau applies to us. What each source covers