Humanverse

Emilly vs Emily

American parents have registered 898,296 Emilys since 1880, against 1,462 Emillys. Emily is still ahead, with 5,461 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Emilly Emily

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

Emily 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 2025, when Emilly had 59 and Emily had 5,461.

Side by side

  Emilly Emily
Total US births 1,462898,296
Most in one year 6926,587
Babies in 2025 595,461
Estimated living today 1,400815,000
Median age today 1927
Peak year 20031999
Best rank 2,393rd girls1st girls
Rank in 2025 2,859th34th
First recorded 19751880
Girls / boys 1,462 / 0896,487 / 1,809

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 Emilys alive today are over 27; half the Emillys are over 19. That is 8 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 Emilly Emily
England and Wales 260122,568
Ireland 1314,203
France 855,830
Poland 281,759

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: Emilly and Emily.