Humanverse

Arian vs Ariana

American parents have registered 120,580 Arianas since 1880, against 8,290 Arians. Ariana is still ahead, with 2,219 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Arian against Ariana, 1880 to 2025 0 1.5k 3k 4.5k 6k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Arian Ariana

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

Ariana has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1957 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1973, when Arian had 23 and Ariana had 48.

Side by side

  Arian Ariana
Total US births 8,290120,580
Most in one year 5435,514
Babies in 2025 2492,219
Estimated living today 8,200119,000
Median age today 1216
Peak year 20132014
Best rank 538th boys37th girls
Rank in 2025 965th128th
First recorded 19691957
Girls / boys 1,578 / 6,712120,380 / 200

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 Arianas alive today are over 16; half the Arians are over 12. That is 4 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 Arian Ariana
England and Wales 8746,108
Switzerland 8311,259
France 1501,605
Norway 747553
Italy 452701
Poland 220783
Belgium 153794
Scotland 6497
Ireland 15387

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: Arian and Ariana.