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Maddison vs Madelyn

American parents have registered 116,060 Madelyns since 1880, against 24,116 Maddisons. Madelyn is still ahead, with 3,362 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Maddison against Madelyn, 1880 to 2025 0 1.3k 2.5k 3.8k 5k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Maddison Madelyn

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

Madelyn has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1890 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1995, when Maddison had 389 and Madelyn had 716.

Side by side

  Maddison Madelyn
Total US births 24,116116,060
Most in one year 1,1674,572
Babies in 2025 7033,362
Estimated living today 24,000107,000
Median age today 1414
Peak year 20092008
Best rank 281st girls64th girls
Rank in 2025 438th70th
First recorded 19851890
Girls / boys 24,063 / 53116,010 / 50

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 Maddison Madelyn
England and Wales 15,272799
Scotland 7064
Ireland 28624
Northern Ireland 25519
France 6520

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: Maddison and Madelyn.