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Sander vs Santana

American parents have registered 13,726 Santanas since 1880, against 1,667 Sanders. Santana is still ahead, with 377 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Sander against Santana, 1880 to 2025 0 200 400 600 800 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Sander Santana

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 113 years in which either name was published, Santana for 63 years and Sander for 50 years. The lead changed hands 16 times.

10 shorter spells of a year or two are folded into the spans above rather than listed separately.

Side by side

  Sander Santana
Total US births 1,66713,726
Most in one year 46654
Babies in 2025 41377
Estimated living today 1,30013,000
Median age today 2116
Peak year 20202020
Best rank 2,689th boys542nd boys
Rank in 2025 2,991st855th
First recorded 19121910
Girls / boys 79 / 1,5885,941 / 7,785

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 Sanders alive today are over 21; half the Santanas are over 16. That is 5 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 Sander Santana
France 85245
England and Wales 44192
Poland 96

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: Sander and Santana.