Humanverse

Fatma vs Fatoumata

American parents have registered 2,537 Fatoumatas since 1880, against 835 Fatmas. Fatoumata is still ahead, with 95 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Fatma against Fatoumata, 1880 to 2025 0 40 80 120 160 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Fatma Fatoumata

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 47 years in which either name was published, Fatoumata for 34 years and Fatma for 13 years. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Fatma Fatoumata
Total US births 8352,537
Most in one year 35121
Babies in 2025 1195
Estimated living today 8302,500
Median age today 1914
Peak year 20142024
Best rank 4,178th girls1,681st girls
Rank in 2025 8,860th2,002nd
First recorded 19781991
Girls / boys 835 / 02,537 / 0

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 Fatmas alive today are over 19; half the Fatoumatas are over 14. That is 5 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 Fatma Fatoumata
France 7,44011,930
England and Wales 837283
Belgium 439673
Switzerland 17054
Scotland 203

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: Fatma and Fatoumata.