Ilah vs Ilana

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Ilah Ilana

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 133 years in which either name was published, Ilana for 73 years and Ilah for 60 years. The lead changed hands 5 times.

• 1891–1945 Ilah ahead
• 1946 Ilana ahead
• 1947–1950 Ilah ahead
• 1951 Ilana ahead
• 1952–1953 Ilah ahead
• 1955–2025 Ilana 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 Ilanas alive today are over 28; half the Ilahs are over 7. That is 21 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Ilah Michigan (16.5×), California (1.3×), Texas (1.1×)
• Ilana New York (5.1×), New Jersey (2.8×), Florida (2.2×)

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

• Ilah vs Ila
• Ilah vs Ilan
• Ilah vs Ilaria
• Ilah vs Ilani
• Ilana vs Ila
• Ilana vs Ilan
• Ilana vs Ilaria
• Ilana vs Ilani