Humanverse

Mahad vs Mahdi

American parents have registered 2,398 Mahdis since 1880, against 790 Mahads. Mahdi is still ahead, with 104 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Mahad against Mahdi, 1880 to 2025 0 30 60 90 120 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Mahad Mahdi

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

Mahdi has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1959 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2000, when Mahad had 27 and Mahdi had 42.

Side by side

  Mahad Mahdi
Total US births 7902,398
Most in one year 42107
Babies in 2025 14104
Estimated living today 7802,400
Median age today 1414
Peak year 20172024
Best rank 2,840th boys1,599th boys
Rank in 2025 6,143rd1,621st
First recorded 19901959
Girls / boys 0 / 7900 / 2,398

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 Mahad Mahdi
France 302,840
England and Wales 5311,178
Norway 201212
Ireland 813

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: Mahad and Mahdi.