Humanverse

Alise vs Aliyah

American parents have registered 49,054 Aliyahs since 1880, against 3,613 Alises. Aliyah is still ahead, with 1,188 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Alise against Aliyah, 1880 to 2025 0 600 1.2k 1.8k 2.4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Alise Aliyah

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 107 years in which either name was published, Alise for 71 years and Aliyah for 36 years. The lead changed hands 3 times.

Side by side

  Alise Aliyah
Total US births 3,61349,054
Most in one year 922,301
Babies in 2025 291,188
Estimated living today 3,30049,000
Median age today 2614
Peak year 19872011
Best rank 1,424th girls133rd girls
Rank in 2025 4,661st263rd
First recorded 19081971
Girls / boys 3,613 / 049,011 / 43

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 Alises alive today are over 26; half the Aliyahs are over 14. 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 Alise Aliyah
France 3307,055
England and Wales 2904,930
Ireland 52188
Scotland 6219

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: Alise and Aliyah.