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Mordecai vs Morgan

American parents have registered 269,269 Morgans since 1880, against 1,650 Mordecais. Morgan is still ahead, with 1,509 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Mordecai against Morgan, 1880 to 2025 0 4k 8k 12k 16k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Mordecai Morgan

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

Morgan 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 1939, when Mordecai had 10 and Morgan had 104.

Side by side

  Mordecai Morgan
Total US births 1,650269,269
Most in one year 9912,135
Babies in 2025 701,509
Estimated living today 1,400258,000
Median age today 926
Peak year 20221995
Best rank 1,706th boys23rd girls
Rank in 2025 2,091st312th
First recorded 19121880
Girls / boys 0 / 1,650223,626 / 45,643

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 Morgans alive today are over 26; half the Mordecais are over 9. That is 17 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 Mordecai Morgan
England and Wales 6425,941

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: Mordecai and Morgan.