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Debora vs Deborah

American parents have registered 744,478 Deborahs since 1880, against 30,161 Deboras. Deborah is still ahead, with 313 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Debora against Deborah, 1880 to 2025 0 15k 30k 45k 60k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Debora Deborah

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

Deborah 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 2023, when Debora had 106 and Deborah had 267.

Side by side

  Debora Deborah
Total US births 30,161744,478
Most in one year 2,37154,754
Babies in 2025 78313
Estimated living today 26,000610,000
Median age today 6568
Peak year 19571954
Best rank 161st girls3rd girls
Rank in 2025 2,326th862nd
First recorded 19151880
Girls / boys 30,133 / 28742,820 / 1,658

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 Deborahs alive today are over 68; half the Deboras are over 65. That is 3 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 Debora Deborah
France 1,85530,930
Italy 4,0282,409
Ireland 274,852
Scotland 194,414
England and Wales 1912,265
Belgium 1961,128
Switzerland 521592

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: Debora and Deborah.