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Brent vs Brenton

American parents have registered 140,366 Brents since 1880, against 15,117 Brentons. Brent is still ahead, with 116 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Brent against Brenton, 1880 to 2025 0 1.3k 2.5k 3.8k 5k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Brent Brenton

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

Brent has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1885 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2018, when Brent had 163 and Brenton had 156.

Side by side

  Brent Brenton
Total US births 140,36615,117
Most in one year 4,300806
Babies in 2025 11670
Estimated living today 122,00014,000
Median age today 4734
Peak year 19701984
Best rank 74th boys260th boys
Rank in 2025 1,509th2,091st
First recorded 18851912
Girls / boys 567 / 139,79918 / 15,099

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 Brents alive today are over 47; half the Brentons are over 34. That is 13 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 Brent Brenton
England and Wales 24342

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: Brent and Brenton.