Humanverse

Jamaica vs Jameson

American parents have registered 63,091 Jamesons since 1880, against 1,569 Jamaicas. Jameson is still ahead, with 2,630 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Jamaica against Jameson, 1880 to 2025 0 1.3k 2.5k 3.8k 5k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Jamaica Jameson

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

Jameson has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1922 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1978, when Jamaica had 57 and Jameson had 67.

Side by side

  Jamaica Jameson
Total US births 1,56963,091
Most in one year 694,708
Babies in 2025 under 52,630
Estimated living today 1,50062,000
Median age today 338
Peak year 19772019
Best rank 1,701st girls77th boys
Rank in 2025 unranked137th
First recorded 19721922
Girls / boys 1,532 / 371,208 / 61,883

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 Jamaicas alive today are over 33; half the Jamesons are over 8. That is 25 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 Jamaica Jameson
England and Wales 3532

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: Jamaica and Jameson.