Elfreda vs Elfrieda

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Elfreda Elfrieda

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 85 years in which either name was published, Elfrieda for 64 years and Elfreda for 21 years. The lead changed hands 11 times.

• 1882–1940 Elfrieda ahead
• 1941–1942 Elfreda ahead
• 1943 Elfrieda ahead
• 1944 Elfreda ahead
• 1945–1946 Elfrieda ahead
• 1947 Elfreda ahead
• 1948 Elfrieda ahead
• 1949–1950 Elfreda ahead
• 1951 Elfrieda ahead
• 1952–1958 Elfreda ahead
• 1959 Elfrieda ahead
• 1960–1978 Elfreda 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 Elfriedas alive today are over 82; half the Elfredas are over 71. That is 11 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.

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