Lora vs Lorna

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Lora Lorna

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

Of the 146 years in which either name was published, Lora for 115 years and Lorna for 31 years. The lead changed hands 14 times.

• 1880–1922 Lora ahead
• 1931–1957 Lorna ahead, apart from one short spell
• 1958–2023 Lora ahead, apart from one short spell

10 shorter spells of a year or two are folded into the spans above rather than listed separately.

Side by side

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 Lornas alive today are over 66; half the Loras are over 58. That is 8 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Lora West Virginia (3.5×), Kentucky (2.6×), Indiana (2.2×)
• Lorna Hawaii (7.3×), South Dakota (3.3×), Utah (3.1×)

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.

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

• Lora vs Lori
• Lora vs Lorraine
• Lora vs Loretta
• Lora vs Lorenzo
• Lora vs Loren
• Lora vs Lorena
• Lorna vs Lori
• Lorna vs Lorraine