Mat vs Mateo

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Mat Mateo

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

Of the 141 years in which either name was published, Mateo for 93 years and Mat for 48 years. The lead changed hands 23 times.

• 1880–1919 Mat ahead, apart from 2 short spells
• 1924–1957 Mateo ahead, apart from 2 short spells
• 1961–1965 Mat ahead
• 1969–2025 Mateo ahead

16 shorter spells of a year or two are folded into the spans above rather than listed separately.

Side by side

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 Mats alive today are over 60; half the Mateos are over 6. That is 54 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

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

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• Mateo vs Mattie
• Mateo vs Mathew