Bill vs Billy

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Bill Billy

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, Billy for 105 years and Bill for 41 years. The lead changed hands once.

• 1880–1920 Bill ahead
• 1921–2025 Billy 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 Bills alive today are over 67; half the Billys are over 63. That is 4 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Bill Oklahoma (3.6×), Wyoming (3.0×), Montana (2.9×)
• Billy Arkansas (5.0×), Oklahoma (4.5×), Tennessee (3.4×)

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

• Bill vs Billie
• Bill vs Bilal
• Bill vs Billye
• Bill vs Billi
• Bill vs Billiejo
• Billy vs Billie
• Billy vs Bilal
• Billy vs Billye