Dot vs Dotty

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Dot Dotty

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 100 years in which either name was published, Dot for 53 years and Dotty for 47 years. The lead changed hands 14 times.

• 1883–1935 Dot ahead, apart from 2 short spells
• 1939–2015 Dotty ahead
• 2018–2022 Dot ahead

10 shorter spells of a year or two are folded into the spans above rather than listed separately.

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 Dots alive today are over 77; half the Dottys are over 72. That is 5 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Dot Alabama (25.4×), Mississippi (20.1×)
• Dotty West Virginia (24.1×), Kentucky (13.7×), Pennsylvania (2.5×)

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

• Dot vs Dottie
• Dotty vs Dottie