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Samera vs Sammy

American parents have registered 45,140 Sammys since 1880, against 571 Sameras. Sammy is still ahead, with 110 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Samera against Sammy, 1880 to 2025 0 400 800 1.2k 1.6k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Samera Sammy

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

Sammy has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1896 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2007, when Samera had 28 and Sammy had 189.

Side by side

  Samera Sammy
Total US births 57145,140
Most in one year 301,239
Babies in 2025 7110
Estimated living today 56029,000
Median age today 1959
Peak year 20041947
Best rank 4,492nd girls175th boys
Rank in 2025 11,932nd1,852nd
First recorded 19751896
Girls / boys 571 / 01,758 / 43,382

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 Sammys alive today are over 59; half the Sameras are over 19. That is 40 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

Country Samera Sammy
France 1951,485
England and Wales 162977
Scotland 467

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: Samera and Sammy.