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Alisa vs Aliyah

American parents have registered 49,054 Aliyahs since 1880, against 34,727 Alisas. Aliyah is still ahead, with 1,188 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Alisa against Aliyah, 1880 to 2025 0 600 1.2k 1.8k 2.4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Alisa Aliyah

Each line is every baby given the name that year, girls and boys added together — the only count that means the same thing for both names. A line breaks where the name fell below five babies in a year — the point at which the SSA stops publishing it — rather than being drawn through a figure nobody published. A single published year in a gap shows as a dot.

Who was ahead

Of the 81 years in which either name was published, Alisa for 49 years and Aliyah for 32 years. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Alisa Aliyah
Total US births 34,72749,054
Most in one year 1,1532,301
Babies in 2025 1251,188
Estimated living today 33,00049,000
Median age today 4514
Peak year 19702011
Best rank 265th girls133rd girls
Rank in 2025 1,652nd263rd
First recorded 19451971
Girls / boys 34,705 / 2249,011 / 43

A rank is a position within one sex’s list for one year, so the two rank rows are not subtracted from one another and the winning column is not marked on them. The living figure is a life-table estimate, not a count.

Which name is older

Half of the Alisas alive today are over 45; half the Aliyahs are over 14. That is 31 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

How much commoner the name is in that state than it is nationally, from births recorded since 1910.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

Country Alisa Aliyah
France 4807,055
England and Wales 1,3514,930
Switzerland 878530
Poland 1,07122
Belgium 370583
Ireland 156188
Scotland 72219
Northern Ireland 1154

Every spelling a country files separately is added together, over whatever years that country publishes — which is not the same range in any two of them, so read the columns against each other and not the rows.

Compare something else

Related comparisons

Social Security Administration birth records, 1880–2025, public domain. Full histories: Alisa and Aliyah.