Love vs Lovely
American parents have registered 5,785 Loves since 1880, against 2,397 Lovelys. Love is still ahead, with 290 babies in 2025.
Babies given each name, 1880–2025
Love Lovely
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 141 years in which either name was published, Love for 120 years and Lovely for 21 years. The lead changed hands 26 times.
- 1880–1947 Love ahead, apart from 2 short spells
- 1957–1960 Lovely ahead
- 1961–1980 Love ahead
- 1990–1992 Lovely ahead
- 1999–2025 Love ahead, apart from one short spell
19 shorter spells of a year or two are folded into the spans above rather than listed separately.
Side by side
| Love | Lovely | |
|---|---|---|
| Total US births | 5,785 | 2,397 |
| Most in one year | 418 | 104 |
| Babies in 2025 | 290 | 83 |
| Estimated living today | 4,700 | 2,300 |
| Median age today | 8 | 14 |
| Peak year | 2022 | 2023 |
| Best rank | 750th girls | 1,903rd girls |
| Rank in 2025 | 955th | 2,214th |
| First recorded | 1880 | 1917 |
| Girls / boys | 4,797 / 988 | 2,385 / 12 |
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 Lovelys alive today are over 14; half the Loves are over 8. That is 6 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.
Where each one is strongest
- Love Nevada (3.7×), Georgia (2.6×), Florida (2.3×)
- Lovely Florida (5.0×), California (3.9×), Texas (2.7×)
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 | Love | Lovely |
|---|---|---|
| France | 165 | 670 |
| Belgium | 7 | 172 |
| England and Wales | 109 | 8 |
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: Love and Lovely.