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Arno vs Arnold

American parents have registered 104,396 Arnolds since 1880, against 1,723 Arnos. Arnold is still ahead, with 120 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Arno Arnold

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

Arnold has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1880 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2023, when Arno had 30 and Arnold had 105.

Side by side

  Arno Arnold
Total US births 1,723104,396
Most in one year 552,031
Babies in 2025 27120
Estimated living today 72038,000
Median age today 4865
Peak year 19151924
Best rank 823rd boys95th boys
Rank in 2025 3,949th1,477th
First recorded 18881880
Girls / boys 0 / 1,723550 / 103,846

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 Arnolds alive today are over 65; half the Arnos are over 48. That is 17 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 Arno Arnold
France 2,1902,600
Belgium 3,37940
England and Wales 141789
Switzerland 71751
Poland 6102

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: Arno and Arnold.