Cale vs Cali

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Cale Cali

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 75 years in which either name was published, Cale for 38 years and Cali for 37 years. The lead changed hands 7 times.

• 1917–1958 Cale ahead
• 1959–1963 Cali ahead
• 1964 Cale ahead
• 1965 Cali ahead
• 1966–1988 Cale ahead
• 1989–1990 Cali ahead
• 1991–1994 Cale ahead
• 1995–2025 Cali 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 Cales alive today are over 23; half the Calis are over 11. That is 12 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Cale Oklahoma (6.4×), Iowa (5.3×), Kansas (5.2×)
• Cali Nevada (2.5×), Florida (2.0×), Georgia (1.6×)

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

• Cale vs Caleb
• Cale vs Calvin
• Cale vs Callie
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• Cale vs Callan
• Cali vs Caleb
• Cali vs Calvin
• Cali vs Callie