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Maddalena vs Madeleine

American parents have registered 45,737 Madeleines since 1880, against 881 Maddalenas. Madeleine is still ahead, with 679 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Maddalena Madeleine

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

Madeleine has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1881 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1976, when Maddalena had 9 and Madeleine had 32.

Side by side

  Maddalena Madeleine
Total US births 88145,737
Most in one year 351,424
Babies in 2025 31679
Estimated living today 83039,000
Median age today 1620
Peak year 20151998
Best rank 4,144th girls217th girls
Rank in 2025 4,460th454th
First recorded 19161881
Girls / boys 881 / 045,722 / 15

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 Madeleines alive today are over 20; half the Maddalenas are over 16. That is 4 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 Maddalena Madeleine
France 220306,930
England and Wales 9213,024
Switzerland 46222
Poland 233

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: Maddalena and Madeleine.