Humanverse

Peace vs Pearl

American parents have registered 163,010 Pearls since 1880, against 1,109 Peaces. Pearl is still ahead, with 350 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Peace against Pearl, 1880 to 2025 0 1.3k 2.5k 3.8k 5k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Peace Pearl

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

Pearl 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 2020, when Peace had 94 and Pearl had 351.

Side by side

  Peace Pearl
Total US births 1,109163,010
Most in one year 944,622
Babies in 2025 66350
Estimated living today 1,10027,000
Median age today 660
Peak year 20231918
Best rank 2,936th girls56th girls
Rank in 2025 4,067th776th
First recorded 19181880
Girls / boys 758 / 351159,088 / 3,922

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 Pearls alive today are over 60; half the Peaces are over 6. That is 54 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 Peace Pearl
England and Wales 2463,696
France 40540
Ireland 32451

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: Peace and Pearl.