Humanverse

Mahad vs Mahmoud

American parents have registered 2,739 Mahmouds since 1880, against 790 Mahads. Mahmoud is still ahead, with 64 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Mahad against Mahmoud, 1880 to 2025 0 25 50 75 100 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Mahad Mahmoud

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

Mahmoud has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1968 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2021, when Mahad had 37 and Mahmoud had 47.

Side by side

  Mahad Mahmoud
Total US births 7902,739
Most in one year 4291
Babies in 2025 1464
Estimated living today 7802,700
Median age today 1421
Peak year 20172018
Best rank 2,840th boys1,717th boys
Rank in 2025 6,143rd2,207th
First recorded 19901968
Girls / boys 0 / 7900 / 2,739

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 Mahmouds alive today are over 21; half the Mahads are over 14. That is 7 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 Mahad Mahmoud
France 301,555
England and Wales 531481
Norway 201704
Ireland 810

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 Mahmoud.