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Maxim vs Maximus

American parents have registered 34,679 Maximuses since 1880, against 6,998 Maxims. Maximus is still ahead, with 1,249 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Maxim against Maximus, 1880 to 2025 0 600 1.2k 1.8k 2.4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Maxim Maximus

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 70 years in which either name was published, Maxim for 44 years and Maximus for 26 years. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Maxim Maximus
Total US births 6,99834,679
Most in one year 3462,137
Babies in 2025 1141,249
Estimated living today 6,80034,000
Median age today 1411
Peak year 20122014
Best rank 683rd boys192nd boys
Rank in 2025 1,520th275th
First recorded 19231997
Girls / boys 6 / 6,99217 / 34,662

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 Maxims alive today are over 14; half the Maximuses are over 11. That is 3 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 Maxim Maximus
England and Wales 1,9375,387
Belgium 5,14432
France 3,04560
Switzerland 1,00741
Poland 33864
Ireland 233153
Scotland 32148
Northern Ireland 327

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: Maxim and Maximus.