Humanverse

Mekhi vs Meklit

American parents have registered 12,467 Mekhis since 1880, against 506 Meklits. Mekhi is still ahead, with 176 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Mekhi against Meklit, 1880 to 2025 0 250 500 750 1k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Mekhi Meklit

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

Mekhi has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1995 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2019, when Mekhi had 329 and Meklit had 40.

Side by side

  Mekhi Meklit
Total US births 12,467506
Most in one year 86840
Babies in 2025 1768
Estimated living today 12,000500
Median age today 169
Peak year 20052017
Best rank 344th boys3,769th girls
Rank in 2025 1,169th10,917th
First recorded 19952003
Girls / boys 113 / 12,354506 / 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 Mekhis alive today are over 16; half the Meklits are over 9. 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 Mekhi Meklit
England and Wales 30350

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: Mekhi and Meklit.