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Mace vs Macy

American parents have registered 33,304 Macys since 1880, against 1,977 Maces. Macy is still ahead, with 390 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Mace against Macy, 1880 to 2025 0 400 800 1.2k 1.6k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Mace Macy

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 140 years in which either name was published, Macy for 129 years and Mace for 11 years. The lead changed hands 9 times.

Side by side

  Mace Macy
Total US births 1,97733,304
Most in one year 651,494
Babies in 2025 54390
Estimated living today 1,60032,000
Median age today 1420
Peak year 20162003
Best rank 2,134th boys219th girls
Rank in 2025 2,480th718th
First recorded 18801885
Girls / boys 0 / 1,97732,749 / 555

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 Macys alive today are over 20; half the Maces are over 14. That is 6 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

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 Mace Macy
England and Wales 1804,461
Belgium 2660

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: Mace and Macy.