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Maddox vs Madison

American parents have registered 427,675 Madisons since 1880, against 48,944 Maddoxes. Madison is still ahead, with 4,963 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Maddox against Madison, 1880 to 2025 0 6k 12k 18k 24k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Maddox Madison

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

Madison has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1880 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2019, when Maddox had 2,590 and Madison had 6,337.

Side by side

  Maddox Madison
Total US births 48,944427,675
Most in one year 3,14722,292
Babies in 2025 1,7304,963
Estimated living today 49,000421,000
Median age today 1020
Peak year 20172001
Best rank 136th boys2nd girls
Rank in 2025 209th40th
First recorded 19951880
Girls / boys 1,825 / 47,119419,806 / 7,869

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 Madisons alive today are over 20; half the Maddoxes are over 10. That is 10 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 Maddox Madison
England and Wales 2,08318,835
France 255,175
Scotland 701,442
Ireland 181,092
Northern Ireland 43766
Belgium 57626
Switzerland 59148
Poland 247

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: Maddox and Madison.