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Lance vs Lander

American parents have registered 106,184 Lances since 1880, against 1,162 Landers. Lance is still ahead, with 279 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Lance Lander

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

Lance has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1899 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1934, when Lance had 18 and Lander had 8.

Side by side

  Lance Lander
Total US births 106,1841,162
Most in one year 4,17341
Babies in 2025 27941
Estimated living today 92,000960
Median age today 4515
Peak year 19702025
Best rank 76th boys2,991st boys
Rank in 2025 862nd2,991st
First recorded 18991913
Girls / boys 345 / 105,8390 / 1,162

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 Lances alive today are over 45; half the Landers are over 15. That is 30 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

Country Lance Lander
Belgium 743,218
England and Wales 64812

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: Lance and Lander.