Humanverse

Sahra vs Sara

American parents have registered 437,441 Saras since 1880, against 874 Sahras. Sara is still ahead, with 1,568 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Sahra against Sara, 1880 to 2025 0 3k 6k 9k 12k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Sahra Sara

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

Sara 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 2022, when Sahra had 23 and Sara had 1,680.

Side by side

  Sahra Sara
Total US births 874437,441
Most in one year 3511,391
Babies in 2025 151,568
Estimated living today 860354,000
Median age today 2139
Peak year 20071981
Best rank 4,299th girls26th girls
Rank in 2025 7,133rd198th
First recorded 19741880
Girls / boys 874 / 0436,193 / 1,248

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 Saras alive today are over 39; half the Sahras are over 21. That is 18 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 Sahra Sara
France 2,51028,775
England and Wales 43714,632
Norway 34911,910
Belgium 1217,089

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: Sahra and Sara.