Humanverse

Mae vs Maeleigh

American parents have registered 115,441 Maes since 1880, against 883 Maeleighs. Mae is still ahead, with 594 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Mae against Maeleigh, 1880 to 2025 0 800 1.6k 2.4k 3.2k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Mae Maeleigh

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

Mae 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 2012, when Mae had 373 and Maeleigh had 50.

Side by side

  Mae Maeleigh
Total US births 115,441883
Most in one year 2,76965
Babies in 2025 59454
Estimated living today 27,000880
Median age today 658
Peak year 19182016
Best rank 95th girls2,667th girls
Rank in 2025 500th3,028th
First recorded 18802000
Girls / boys 114,835 / 606883 / 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 Maes alive today are over 65; half the Maeleighs are over 8. That is 57 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 Mae Maeleigh
England and Wales 2,6933

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: Mae and Maeleigh.