Humanverse

Lucas vs Lucy

American parents have registered 331,628 Lucases since 1880, against 237,613 Lucys. Lucas is still ahead, with 10,228 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Lucas against Lucy, 1880 to 2025 0 4k 8k 12k 16k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Lucas Lucy

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, Lucy for 94 years and Lucas for 52 years. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Lucas Lucy
Total US births 331,628237,613
Most in one year 13,0446,184
Babies in 2025 10,2286,184
Estimated living today 324,000135,000
Median age today 1314
Peak year 20172025
Best rank 11th boys24th girls
Rank in 2025 10th24th
First recorded 18811880
Girls / boys 536 / 331,092236,969 / 644

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.

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 Lucas Lucy
France 188,0959,505
England and Wales 50,44271,001
Belgium 16,0841,268
Scotland 5,19511,417
Ireland 2,1789,634
New Zealand 4,4605,773
Norway 5,607317
Switzerland 3,9681,246
Northern Ireland 1,4603,730
Poland 632225

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: Lucas and Lucy.