Humanverse

Lataya vs Latoya

American parents have registered 45,748 Latoyas since 1880, against 769 Latayas. Latoya is still ahead, with 8 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Lataya against Latoya, 1880 to 2025 0 1.5k 3k 4.5k 6k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Lataya Latoya

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

Latoya has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1960 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2003, when Lataya had 20 and Latoya had 43.

Side by side

  Lataya Latoya
Total US births 76945,748
Most in one year 475,069
Babies in 2025 under 58
Estimated living today 75044,000
Median age today 3842
Peak year 19811984
Best rank 2,158th girls60th girls
Rank in 2025 unranked10,917th
First recorded 19711960
Girls / boys 769 / 045,563 / 185

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 Latoyas alive today are over 42; half the Latayas are over 38. That is 4 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 Lataya Latoya
England and Wales 89195

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: Lataya and Latoya.