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Coley vs Collin

American parents have registered 81,962 Collins since 1880, against 2,377 Coleys. Collin is still ahead, with 619 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Coley against Collin, 1880 to 2025 0 1k 2k 3k 4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Coley Collin

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 131 years in which either name was published, Collin for 97 years and Coley for 34 years. The lead changed hands 17 times.

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

Side by side

  Coley Collin
Total US births 2,37781,962
Most in one year 423,369
Babies in 2025 15619
Estimated living today 1,60079,000
Median age today 3423
Peak year 19931996
Best rank 2,123rd boys115th boys
Rank in 2025 8,910th493rd
First recorded 18811895
Girls / boys 348 / 2,029525 / 81,437

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 Coleys alive today are over 34; half the Collins are over 23. That is 11 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 Coley Collin
England and Wales 1464

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: Coley and Collin.