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Margueritte vs Mary

American parents have registered 4,156,654 Marys since 1880, against 1,221 Marguerittes. Mary is still ahead, with 2,230 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Margueritte against Mary, 1880 to 2025 0 20k 40k 60k 80k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Margueritte Mary

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

Mary 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 1907, when Margueritte had 20 and Mary had 17,650.

Side by side

  Margueritte Mary
Total US births 1,2214,156,654
Most in one year 5674,171
Babies in 2025 under 52,230
Estimated living today 1901.7 million
Median age today 7669
Peak year 19191921
Best rank 944th girls1st girls
Rank in 2025 unranked125th
First recorded 18881880
Girls / boys 1,221 / 04,141,481 / 15,173

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 Marguerittes alive today are over 76; half the Marys are over 69. That is 7 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 Margueritte Mary
France 4556,930

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: Margueritte and Mary.