Precious vs Prentiss
American parents have registered 19,540 Preciouses since 1880, against 2,789 Prentisses. Precious is still ahead, with 51 babies in 2025.
Babies given each name, 1880–2025
Precious Prentiss
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 131 years in which either name was published, Precious for 75 years and Prentiss for 56 years. The lead changed hands 19 times.
- 1902–1911 Precious ahead, apart from one short spell
- 1912–1965 Prentiss ahead, apart from 2 short spells
- 1966–2025 Precious ahead
14 shorter spells of a year or two are folded into the spans above rather than listed separately.
Side by side
| Precious | Prentiss | |
|---|---|---|
| Total US births | 19,540 | 2,789 |
| Most in one year | 746 | 50 |
| Babies in 2025 | 51 | under 5 |
| Estimated living today | 19,000 | 1,700 |
| Median age today | 28 | 50 |
| Peak year | 2001 | 1943 |
| Best rank | 392nd girls | 980th boys |
| Rank in 2025 | 3,130th | unranked |
| First recorded | 1897 | 1887 |
| Girls / boys | 19,393 / 147 | 65 / 2,724 |
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 Prentisses alive today are over 50; half the Preciouses are over 28. That is 22 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.
Where each one is strongest
- Precious Hawaii (3.3×), Louisiana (2.5×), Mississippi (2.2×)
- Prentiss Mississippi (60.0×), Louisiana (6.9×), South Carolina (2.1×)
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 | Precious | Prentiss |
|---|---|---|
| France | 175 | 20 |
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: Precious and Prentiss.