Silvia

80,787 people in America carry this name — ranked #656 of 923.

Carried mostly by the Millennials.

Say it SIHL vee uh

3 syllables · the capitals are the stressed part

Phonetic transcription

S IH1 L V IY0 AH0 — ARPAbet, as published in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. The digit on a vowel marks its stress.

  • People counted 80,787 2020 Census
  • Rank #656 Familiar
  • Per 100,000 26.7 about 1 in 4,103 people
  • As a surname 5,153 ranked #6,346 the other way round

The meaning and origin of Silvia

Latin in origin, reading literally as “living in a wood”.

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.

Silvia name popularity by year

20,430 babies were given this name since 1884. The busiest year was 1991, with 374 of them.

80 90 00 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 Silvia

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

Better avoided

  • Silvia Susan — same opening
  • Silvia Sarah — same opening
  • Silvia Ashley — runs together

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.

Is Silvia a boy's or a girl's name?

0.2% men
80,632 women

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

Spellings of Silvia

Silvia is how 66% of them spell it — 121,656 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.

The same name abroad

  • Silas English
  • Sylvia English
  • Silvie French
  • Silvio Italian
  • Sylvius
  • Silvano Italian
  • Silvain French
  • Sylvanus
  • Sylvester English
  • Silvester English
  • Silvestre French

Forms of one name traced to the same root. Spellings are as the glossary printed them, so some look older than the versions in use today.

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.

Who carries it today

  • White alone (non-Hispanic) — 9.4%
  • Black or African American alone (non-Hispanic) — 1.2%
  • Hispanic or Latino origin — 87.8%
  • Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone — 1.1%

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.

Same syllables and stress as Silvia

Ends on the same sound

Same rhythm — 3 syllables, stress on the first

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

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
Other names of Latin origin