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Matisse vs Matteo

American parents have registered 33,499 Matteos since 1880, against 582 Matisses. Matteo is still ahead, with 2,455 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Matisse Matteo

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

Matteo has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1911 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1992, when Matisse had 8 and Matteo had 34.

Side by side

  Matisse Matteo
Total US births 58233,499
Most in one year 282,589
Babies in 2025 212,455
Estimated living today 58033,000
Median age today 157
Peak year 20212024
Best rank 3,814th boys138th boys
Rank in 2025 5,608th146th
First recorded 19881911
Girls / boys 220 / 36216 / 33,483

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 Matisses alive today are over 15; half the Matteos are over 7. That is 8 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 Matisse Matteo
France 3,08544,230 Mattéo
Belgium 1,1818,735
Switzerland 937,622
England and Wales 863,824
Poland 2550

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: Matisse and Matteo.