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Sundus vs Sunshine

American parents have registered 5,779 Sunshines since 1880, against 624 Sunduses. Sunshine is still ahead, with 57 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Sundus against Sunshine, 1880 to 2025 0 100 200 300 400 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Sundus Sunshine

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

Sunshine has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1905 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2014, when Sundus had 31 and Sunshine had 46.

Side by side

  Sundus Sunshine
Total US births 6245,779
Most in one year 36324
Babies in 2025 1257
Estimated living today 6205,400
Median age today 1340
Peak year 20171975
Best rank 4,066th girls533rd girls
Rank in 2025 8,362nd2,933rd
First recorded 19911905
Girls / boys 624 / 05,734 / 45

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 Sunshines alive today are over 40; half the Sunduses are over 13. That is 27 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 Sundus Sunshine
England and Wales 25162
France 4080

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: Sundus and Sunshine.