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Danaya vs Danny

American parents have registered 288,341 Dannys since 1880, against 796 Danayas. Danny is still ahead, with 462 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Danaya against Danny, 1880 to 2025 0 2.5k 5k 7.5k 10k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Danaya Danny

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

Danny has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1900 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2005, when Danaya had 50 and Danny had 1,058.

Side by side

  Danaya Danny
Total US births 796288,341
Most in one year 509,126
Babies in 2025 10462
Estimated living today 790212,000
Median age today 2062
Peak year 20051954
Best rank 3,126th girls42nd boys
Rank in 2025 9,457th628th
First recorded 19791900
Girls / boys 796 / 01,693 / 286,648

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 Dannys alive today are over 62; half the Danayas are over 20. That is 42 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 Danaya Danny
England and Wales 538,517
France 103,455

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: Danaya and Danny.