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Ricco vs Rickey

American parents have registered 62,391 Rickeys since 1880, against 1,477 Riccos. Rickey is still ahead, with 45 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Ricco against Rickey, 1880 to 2025 0 1k 2k 3k 4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Ricco Rickey

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 100 years in which either name was published, Rickey for 99 years and Ricco for 1 year. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Ricco Rickey
Total US births 1,47762,391
Most in one year 623,818
Babies in 2025 845
Estimated living today 1,40048,000
Median age today 3664
Peak year 19771958
Best rank 1,099th boys106th boys
Rank in 2025 8,910th2,798th
First recorded 19241924
Girls / boys 0 / 1,477674 / 61,717

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 Rickeys alive today are over 64; half the Riccos are over 36. That is 28 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 Ricco Rickey
England and Wales 2106
Ireland 33

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: Ricco and Rickey.