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Zaliyah vs Zalman

American parents have registered 1,216 Zaliyahs since 1880, against 687 Zalmans. Zaliyah is still ahead, with 166 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Zaliyah against Zalman, 1880 to 2025 0 50 100 150 200 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Zaliyah Zalman

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 59 years in which either name was published, Zalman for 36 years and Zaliyah for 23 years. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Zaliyah Zalman
Total US births 1,216687
Most in one year 16627
Babies in 2025 16621
Estimated living today 1,200660
Median age today 618
Peak year 20252021
Best rank 1,339th girls3,912th boys
Rank in 2025 1,339th4,707th
First recorded 20011949
Girls / boys 1,216 / 00 / 687

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 Zalmans alive today are over 18; half the Zaliyahs are over 6. That is 12 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 Zaliyah Zalman
England and Wales 1930

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: Zaliyah and Zalman.