Oden vs Odetta

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Oden Odetta

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

Of the 89 years in which either name was published, Odetta for 59 years and Oden for 30 years. The lead changed hands 9 times.

• 1900–1913 Odetta ahead
• 1914 Oden ahead
• 1915–1927 Odetta ahead
• 1928 Oden ahead
• 1929–1943 Odetta ahead
• 1944 Oden ahead
• 1945–1946 Odetta ahead
• 1947 Oden ahead
• 1949–1976 Odetta ahead
• 2000–2025 Oden ahead

Side by side

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 Odettas alive today are over 62; half the Odens are over 8. That is 54 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

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

• Oden vs Odell
• Oden vs Odessa
• Oden vs Odette
• Oden vs Odelia
• Oden vs Odella
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• Odetta vs Odell
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