Humanverse

Chan vs Chase

American parents have registered 184,958 Chases since 1880, against 1,247 Chans. Chase is still ahead, with 1,939 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Chan against Chase, 1880 to 2025 0 2k 4k 6k 8k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Chan Chase

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 111 years in which either name was published, Chase for 97 years and Chan for 14 years. The lead changed hands 18 times.

12 shorter spells of a year or two are folded into the spans above rather than listed separately.

Side by side

  Chan Chase
Total US births 1,247184,958
Most in one year 387,494
Babies in 2025 71,939
Estimated living today 1,100181,000
Median age today 4019
Peak year 19862009
Best rank 2,290th boys61st boys
Rank in 2025 9,714th192nd
First recorded 19191885
Girls / boys 212 / 1,0353,798 / 181,160

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 Chans alive today are over 40; half the Chases are over 19. That is 21 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 Chan Chase
England and Wales 143,684

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: Chan and Chase.