Palma vs Palmira

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Palma Palmira

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 111 years in which either name was published, Palma for 85 years and Palmira for 26 years. The lead changed hands 10 times.

• 1889–1967 Palma ahead
• 1968–1969 Palmira ahead
• 1970–1972 Palma ahead
• 1973–1975 Palmira ahead
• 1976 Palma ahead
• 1977–2001 Palmira ahead
• 2002 Palma ahead
• 2003 Palmira ahead
• 2004 Palma ahead
• 2011–2016 Palmira ahead
• 2023–2025 Palma 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 Palmas alive today are over 73; half the Palmiras are over 59. That is 14 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Palma New York (7.1×), New Jersey (3.7×), Pennsylvania (3.3×)
• Palmira Texas (9.9×), Massachusetts (3.6×), California (0.9×)

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.

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

• Palma vs Palmer
• Palma vs Paloma
• Palmira vs Palmer
• Palmira vs Paloma