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Jun vs Junior

American parents have registered 43,182 Juniors since 1880, against 1,608 Juns. Junior is still ahead, with 343 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Jun against Junior, 1880 to 2025 0 500 1k 1.5k 2k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Jun Junior

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

Junior has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1882 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1981, when Jun had 27 and Junior had 107.

Side by side

  Jun Junior
Total US births 1,60843,182
Most in one year 501,607
Babies in 2025 46343
Estimated living today 1,50018,000
Median age today 2229
Peak year 20031926
Best rank 2,312th boys117th boys
Rank in 2025 3,089th752nd
First recorded 19181882
Girls / boys 156 / 1,452195 / 42,987

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 Juniors alive today are over 29; half the Juns are over 22. That is 7 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 Jun Junior
England and Wales 3872,987
France 4001,800
Scotland 32507
Belgium 6250
Northern Ireland 9114
Switzerland 5454
Ireland 1235

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: Jun and Junior.