Lorelei vs Lori

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Lorelei Lori

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 106 years in which either name was published, Lori for 61 years and Lorelei for 45 years. The lead changed hands 6 times.

• 1916–1922 Lorelei ahead
• 1924 Lori ahead
• 1925–1935 Lorelei ahead
• 1936 Lori ahead
• 1937–1942 Lorelei ahead
• 1943–2001 Lori ahead
• 2002–2025 Lorelei ahead

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 Loris alive today are over 59; half the Loreleis are over 12. That is 47 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Lorelei Washington (1.8×), Florida (1.6×), Virginia (1.5×)
• Lori Rhode Island (2.1×), South Dakota (2.1×), Iowa (2.0×)

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

• Lorelei vs Lorraine
• Lorelei vs Loretta
• Lorelei vs Lorenzo
• Lorelei vs Loren
• Lorelei vs Lora
• Lori vs Lorraine
• Lori vs Loretta
• Lori vs Lorenzo