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Denelle vs Dennis

American parents have registered 623,692 Dennises since 1880, against 643 Denelles. Dennis is still ahead, with 381 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Denelle Dennis

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

Dennis 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 1984, when Denelle had 25 and Dennis had 2,978.

Side by side

  Denelle Dennis
Total US births 643623,692
Most in one year 2524,605
Babies in 2025 under 5381
Estimated living today 600408,000
Median age today 4867
Peak year 19701952
Best rank 2,779th girls18th boys
Rank in 2025 unranked707th
First recorded 19511880
Girls / boys 637 / 62,692 / 621,000

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 Dennises alive today are over 67; half the Denelles are over 48. That is 19 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 Denelle Dennis
England and Wales 32,725

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: Denelle and Dennis.