Humanverse

Mae vs Maelie

American parents have registered 115,441 Maes since 1880, against 673 Maelies. Mae is still ahead, with 594 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Mae against Maelie, 1880 to 2025 0 800 1.6k 2.4k 3.2k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Mae Maelie

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

Mae 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 2024, when Mae had 578 and Maelie had 71.

Side by side

  Mae Maelie
Total US births 115,441673
Most in one year 2,76971
Babies in 2025 59443
Estimated living today 27,000670
Median age today 657
Peak year 19182024
Best rank 95th girls2,508th girls
Rank in 2025 500th3,517th
First recorded 18802004
Girls / boys 114,835 / 606673 / 0

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 Maes alive today are over 65; half the Maelies are over 7. That is 58 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 Mae Maelie
France 16,470 Maé6,530
England and Wales 2,69364
Belgium 805 Maé126 Maëlie
Switzerland 549 Maé102 Maëlie

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: Mae and Maelie.