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Parish vs Parker

American parents have registered 163,836 Parkers since 1880, against 1,212 Parishes. Parker is still ahead, with 6,013 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Parish against Parker, 1880 to 2025 0 2k 4k 6k 8k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Parish Parker

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

Parker has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1880 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1967, when Parish had 30 and Parker had 38.

Side by side

  Parish Parker
Total US births 1,212163,836
Most in one year 567,126
Babies in 2025 96,013
Estimated living today 1,100159,000
Median age today 3212
Peak year 19912014
Best rank 1,823rd boys73rd boys
Rank in 2025 8,243rd102nd
First recorded 19151880
Girls / boys 302 / 91032,895 / 130,941

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 Parishes alive today are over 32; half the Parkers are over 12. That is 20 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 Parish Parker
England and Wales 35,328

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: Parish and Parker.