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Aalayah vs Aaliyah

American parents have registered 110,077 Aaliyahs since 1880, against 1,276 Aalayahs. Aaliyah is still ahead, with 2,607 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Aalayah against Aaliyah, 1880 to 2025 0 1.5k 3k 4.5k 6k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Aalayah Aaliyah

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

Aaliyah has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1976 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2019, when Aalayah had 79 and Aaliyah had 3,680.

Side by side

  Aalayah Aaliyah
Total US births 1,276110,077
Most in one year 795,530
Babies in 2025 542,607
Estimated living today 1,300109,000
Median age today 1013
Peak year 20192012
Best rank 2,285th girls36th girls
Rank in 2025 3,028th101st
First recorded 19941976
Girls / boys 1,276 / 0109,971 / 106

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 Aaliyahs alive today are over 13; half the Aalayahs are over 10. That is 3 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 Aalayah Aaliyah
England and Wales 14211,114
Scotland 3504

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: Aalayah and Aaliyah.