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Eliah vs Elias

American parents have registered 129,502 Eliases since 1880, against 1,627 Eliahs. Elias is still ahead, with 8,845 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Eliah Elias

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

Elias 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 2009, when Eliah had 76 and Elias had 2,486.

Side by side

  Eliah Elias
Total US births 1,627129,502
Most in one year 788,845
Babies in 2025 518,845
Estimated living today 1,600121,000
Median age today 139
Peak year 20092025
Best rank 2,320th boys13th boys
Rank in 2025 3,181st13th
First recorded 19721880
Girls / boys 468 / 1,159239 / 129,263

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 Eliahs alive today are over 13; half the Eliases are over 9. That is 4 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 Eliah Elias
France 34517,600
Norway 3079,574
England and Wales 677,787
Switzerland 6506,303
Belgium 655,932

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: Eliah and Elias.