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Chanse vs Charlie

American parents have registered 224,639 Charlies since 1880, against 1,179 Chanses. Charlie is still ahead, with 4,620 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Chanse against Charlie, 1880 to 2025 0 1.3k 2.5k 3.8k 5k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Chanse Charlie

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

Charlie has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1880 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1996, when Chanse had 54 and Charlie had 596.

Side by side

  Chanse Charlie
Total US births 1,179224,639
Most in one year 544,620
Babies in 2025 74,620
Estimated living today 1,100117,000
Median age today 2517
Peak year 19971919
Best rank 1,836th boys66th boys
Rank in 2025 9,714th145th
First recorded 19631880
Girls / boys 16 / 1,16340,359 / 184,280

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 Chanses alive today are over 25; half the Charlies are over 17. That is 8 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Both names abroad

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

Country Chanse Charlie
England and Wales 9114,450

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: Chanse and Charlie.