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Cheikh vs Cheryl

American parents have registered 440,517 Cheryls since 1880, against 512 Cheikhs. Cheryl is still ahead, with 32 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Cheikh against Cheryl, 1880 to 2025 0 8k 16k 24k 32k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Cheikh Cheryl

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

Cheryl has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1909 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2024, when Cheikh had 27 and Cheryl had 37.

Side by side

  Cheikh Cheryl
Total US births 512440,517
Most in one year 2724,178
Babies in 2025 2032
Estimated living today 510361,000
Median age today 1366
Peak year 20241958
Best rank 3,986th boys13th girls
Rank in 2025 4,857th4,352nd
First recorded 19921909
Girls / boys 0 / 512439,539 / 978

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 Cheryls alive today are over 66; half the Cheikhs are over 13. That is 53 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 Cheikh Cheryl
France 1,600835
England and Wales 44400
Belgium 355

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: Cheikh and Cheryl.