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Mabel vs Mabelle

American parents have registered 142,693 Mabels since 1880, against 2,608 Mabelles. Mabel is still ahead, with 1,522 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Mabel against Mabelle, 1880 to 2025 0 1k 2k 3k 4k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Mabel Mabelle

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

Mabel has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1880 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2008, when Mabel had 139 and Mabelle had 9.

Side by side

  Mabel Mabelle
Total US births 142,6932,608
Most in one year 3,69683
Babies in 2025 1,52212
Estimated living today 22,000230
Median age today 1310
Peak year 19151893
Best rank 62nd girls295th girls
Rank in 2025 201st8,362nd
First recorded 18801880
Girls / boys 142,284 / 4092,608 / 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 Mabels alive today are over 13; half the Mabelles are over 10. That is 3 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 Mabel Mabelle
England and Wales 9,60464
France 655
Switzerland 309

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: Mabel and Mabelle.