Viola vs Violet

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Viola Violet

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, Viola for 88 years and Violet for 58 years. The lead changed hands 9 times.

• 1880–1925 Viola ahead
• 1926 Violet ahead
• 1927–1931 Viola ahead
• 1932–1933 Violet ahead
• 1934–1965 Viola ahead
• 1966 Violet ahead
• 1967–1970 Viola ahead
• 1971 Violet ahead
• 1972 Viola ahead
• 1973–2025 Violet ahead

Side by side

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 Violas alive today are over 71; half the Violets are over 9. That is 62 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Viola North Dakota (3.8×), South Dakota (3.5×), New Mexico (2.6×)
• Violet North Dakota (2.7×), Hawaii (2.7×), South Dakota (2.3×)

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.

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

• Viola vs Violeta
• Viola vs Violette
• Viola vs Violetta
• Viola vs Violett
• Viola vs Viona
• Violet vs Violeta
• Violet vs Violette
• Violet vs Violetta