Fitz vs Fitzgerald

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Fitz Fitzgerald

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 79 years in which either name was published, Fitzgerald for 70 years and Fitz for 9 years. The lead changed hands 11 times.

• 1914–1919 Fitz ahead
• 1922 Fitzgerald ahead
• 1923 Fitz ahead
• 1924 Fitzgerald ahead
• 1925 Fitz ahead
• 1928–1929 Fitzgerald ahead
• 1941 Fitz ahead
• 1942 Fitzgerald ahead
• 1943–1948 Fitz ahead
• 1953–2019 Fitzgerald ahead
• 2020 Fitz ahead
• 2021–2025 Fitzgerald 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 Fitzgeralds alive today are over 11; half the Fitzes are over 6. That is 5 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Fitz Texas (3.5×)
• Fitzgerald Minnesota (3.7×), South Carolina (2.9×), Alabama (2.4×)

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.

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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