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Kalayah vs Kaliyah

American parents have registered 12,951 Kaliyahs since 1880, against 1,442 Kalayahs. Kaliyah is still ahead, with 791 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Kalayah against Kaliyah, 1880 to 2025 0 200 400 600 800 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Kalayah Kaliyah

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

Kaliyah has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1994 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2022, when Kalayah had 124 and Kaliyah had 498.

Side by side

  Kalayah Kaliyah
Total US births 1,44212,951
Most in one year 140791
Babies in 2025 129791
Estimated living today 1,40013,000
Median age today 511
Peak year 20242025
Best rank 1,529th girls392nd girls
Rank in 2025 1,611th392nd
First recorded 19981994
Girls / boys 1,442 / 012,946 / 5

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 Kaliyahs alive today are over 11; half the Kalayahs are over 5. That is 6 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 Kalayah Kaliyah
England and Wales 63393

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: Kalayah and Kaliyah.