Humanverse

Starlette vs Starr

American parents have registered 10,167 Starrs since 1880, against 727 Starlettes. Starr is still ahead, with 63 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Starlette against Starr, 1880 to 2025 0 80 160 240 320 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Starlette Starr

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

Starr has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1914 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2017, when Starlette had 13 and Starr had 47.

Side by side

  Starlette Starr
Total US births 72710,167
Most in one year 21307
Babies in 2025 1263
Estimated living today 6709,200
Median age today 4436
Peak year 19821997
Best rank 3,780th girls714th girls
Rank in 2025 8,362nd2,719th
First recorded 19431914
Girls / boys 727 / 09,843 / 324

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 Starlettes alive today are over 44; half the Starrs are over 36. That is 8 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 Starlette Starr
England and Wales 4378

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: Starlette and Starr.