Humanverse

Sophia vs Sophie

American parents have registered 439,619 Sophias since 1880, against 138,694 Sophies. Sophia is still ahead, with 12,572 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Sophia against Sophie, 1880 to 2025 0 6k 12k 18k 24k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Sophia Sophie

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 146 years in which either name was published, Sophia for 93 years and Sophie for 53 years. The lead changed hands 6 times.

Side by side

  Sophia Sophie
Total US births 439,619138,694
Most in one year 22,3544,741
Babies in 2025 12,5723,984
Estimated living today 418,00099,000
Median age today 1314
Peak year 20122011
Best rank 1st girls51st girls
Rank in 2025 5th55th
First recorded 18801880
Girls / boys 439,108 / 511138,577 / 117

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.

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 Sophia Sophie
France 17,830247,475
England and Wales 48,483104,514
Austria 10,89816,224
Italy 11,4278,456
Scotland 4,21115,320
Ireland 4,99812,682
New Zealand 3,2898,852
Switzerland 4,5584,931
Northern Ireland 2,2554,804
Belgium 2,3283,837
Norway 1,6051,492
Poland 1,2351,819

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: Sophia and Sophie.