Brooklyn vs Brown
American parents have registered 127,055 Brooklyns since 1880, against 1,482 Browns. Brooklyn is still ahead, with 2,337 babies in 2025.
Babies given each name, 1880–2025
Brooklyn Brown
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 137 years in which either name was published, Brown for 83 years and Brooklyn for 54 years. The lead changed hands once.
Side by side
| Brooklyn | Brown | |
|---|---|---|
| Total US births | 127,055 | 1,482 |
| Most in one year | 7,257 | 55 |
| Babies in 2025 | 2,337 | 10 |
| Estimated living today | 126,000 | 300 |
| Median age today | 13 | 66 |
| Peak year | 2011 | 1918 |
| Best rank | 21st girls | 894th boys |
| Rank in 2025 | 118th | 7,679th |
| First recorded | 1972 | 1881 |
| Girls / boys | 125,197 / 1,858 | 5 / 1,477 |
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 Browns alive today are over 66; half the Brooklyns are over 13. That is 53 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.
Where each one is strongest
- Brooklyn Utah (3.6×), Nevada (2.6×), Idaho (2.5×)
- Brown Tennessee (15.0×), Mississippi (8.6×), Kentucky (8.3×)
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 | Brooklyn | Brown |
|---|---|---|
| France | 445 | 5 |
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: Brooklyn and Brown.