Cai vs Cairo

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Cai Cairo

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 40 years in which either name was published, Cairo for 33 years and Cai for 7 years. The lead changed hands 10 times.

• 1979–1989 Cairo ahead
• 1990 Cai ahead
• 1991–1992 Cairo ahead
• 1993 Cai ahead
• 1994–1996 Cairo ahead
• 1997 Cai ahead
• 1998–2001 Cairo ahead
• 2002–2004 Cai ahead
• 2005–2007 Cairo ahead
• 2008 Cai ahead
• 2009–2025 Cairo ahead

Side by side

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 Cais alive today are over 9; half the Cairos are over 4. That is 5 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Cai Florida (6.0×), Georgia (3.4×), Texas (3.3×)
• Cairo Nevada (4.1×), Florida (2.7×), Georgia (2.6×)

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.

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

• Cai vs Caitlin
• Cai vs Caitlyn
• Cai vs Caiden
• Cai vs Cain
• Cai vs Cailyn
• Cairo vs Caitlin
• Cairo vs Caitlyn
• Cairo vs Caiden