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Alita vs Aliyah

American parents have registered 49,054 Aliyahs since 1880, against 2,608 Alitas. Aliyah is still ahead, with 1,188 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Alita 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 110 years in which either name was published, Alita for 68 years and Aliyah for 42 years. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Alita Aliyah
Total US births 2,60849,054
Most in one year 1812,301
Babies in 2025 811,188
Estimated living today 2,30049,000
Median age today 2314
Peak year 20202011
Best rank 1,256th girls133rd girls
Rank in 2025 2,256th263rd
First recorded 19141971
Girls / boys 2,608 / 049,011 / 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 Alitas alive today are over 23; half the Aliyahs are over 14. That is 9 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 Alita Aliyah
France 857,055
England and Wales 964,930
Belgium 5583
Switzerland 18530
Poland 1222

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: Alita and Aliyah.