Ngoc vs Ngozi

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Ngoc Ngozi

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 54 years in which either name was published, Ngozi for 31 years and Ngoc for 23 years. The lead changed hands 11 times.

• 1971–1975 Ngozi ahead
• 1976–1977 Ngoc ahead
• 1978–1979 Ngozi ahead
• 1980–1996 Ngoc ahead
• 1997–2001 Ngozi ahead
• 2002 Ngoc ahead
• 2003–2004 Ngozi ahead
• 2005 Ngoc ahead
• 2006–2007 Ngozi ahead
• 2008 Ngoc ahead
• 2009–2024 Ngozi ahead
• 2025 Ngoc ahead

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 Ngocs alive today are over 37; half the Ngozis are over 28. That is 9 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.

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