Dema vs Demi

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Dema Demi

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 112 years in which either name was published, Dema for 66 years and Demi for 46 years. The lead changed hands 5 times.

• 1888–1959 Dema ahead
• 1964 Demi ahead
• 1969 Dema ahead
• 1972 Demi ahead
• 1976–1981 Dema ahead
• 1982–2025 Demi ahead

Side by side

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 Demas alive today are over 25; half the Demis are over 9. That is 16 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.

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

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• Demi vs Demetrius
• Demi vs Demarcus
• Demi vs Demetria