Humanverse

Piero vs Pierson

American parents have registered 3,633 Piersons since 1880, against 821 Pieros. Pierson is still ahead, with 138 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Piero against Pierson, 1880 to 2025 0 50 100 150 200 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Piero Pierson

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 74 years in which either name was published, Pierson for 60 years and Piero for 14 years. The lead changed hands 4 times.

Side by side

  Piero Pierson
Total US births 8213,633
Most in one year 37178
Babies in 2025 26138
Estimated living today 8003,500
Median age today 1812
Peak year 20072020
Best rank 3,090th boys1,134th boys
Rank in 2025 4,050th1,451st
First recorded 19611912
Girls / boys 0 / 821111 / 3,522

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 Pieros alive today are over 18; half the Piersons are over 12. That is 6 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 Piero Pierson
England and Wales 293

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: Piero and Pierson.