Pearly — unisex name

What the Data Says About Pearly

The Social Security Administration has registered 1,689 babies named Pearly between 1884 and 2022, spanning 139 consecutive years of U.S. birth records. As a girl's name, Pearly currently falls outside the top 1,000 girls' names for 2022. The name reached its historical peak in 1924, when 53 babies received it in a single year. Pearly is classified as unisex in SSA records: the opposite-sex variant accounts for 208 additional births since 1912.

Decade-level aggregation shows that Pearly performed strongest in the 1920s, accumulating 366 births during that ten-year window. Across the 13 decades of recorded activity, Pearly shows a clear decline from its mid-century high. Geographically, the name is most concentrated in Louisiana, which accounts for 178 births — the largest state-level total in the dataset — followed by Mississippi and North Carolina. In total, SSA state-level files list Pearly in 10 of the 51 U.S. reporting jurisdictions.

No etymological entry is currently available for Pearly in our reference dataset. These figures derive from SSA's annual national and state-level name files, which include any name appearing at least five times in a given year or state-year; names below that threshold are suppressed for privacy and therefore excluded from the totals shown here. The 1,689 total represents a lower bound — actual usage may be higher in years or states where the count fell below the disclosure floor. This page is provided for informational and research purposes only and does not constitute personal, legal, or naming advice.