Hettie vs Hetty

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Hettie Hetty

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 115 years in which either name was published, Hettie for 111 years and Hetty for 4 years. The lead changed hands 8 times.

• 1880–1976 Hettie ahead
• 1977 Hetty ahead
• 1979–1988 Hettie ahead
• 1989 Hetty ahead
• 1991 Hettie ahead
• 1992 Hetty ahead
• 1994–2002 Hettie ahead
• 2012 Hetty ahead
• 2016–2019 Hettie 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.

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.

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