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Oak vs Oakley

American parents have registered 26,745 Oakleys since 1880, against 674 Oaks. Oakley is still ahead, with 2,621 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Oak Oakley

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

Oakley has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1884 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1974, when Oak had 7 and Oakley had 7.

Side by side

  Oak Oakley
Total US births 67426,745
Most in one year 762,692
Babies in 2025 592,621
Estimated living today 66025,000
Median age today 54
Peak year 20232025
Best rank 2,129th boys156th girls
Rank in 2025 2,332nd156th
First recorded 19201884
Girls / boys 27 / 64715,360 / 11,385

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.

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 Oak Oakley
England and Wales 12511,639

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: Oak and Oakley.