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Prentice vs Presley

American parents have registered 36,723 Presleys since 1880, against 3,992 Prentices. Presley is still ahead, with 1,450 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Prentice against Presley, 1880 to 2025 0 500 1k 1.5k 2k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Prentice Presley

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 135 years in which either name was published, Prentice for 89 years and Presley for 46 years. The lead changed hands 12 times.

7 shorter spells of a year or two are folded into the spans above rather than listed separately.

Side by side

  Prentice Presley
Total US births 3,99236,723
Most in one year 601,886
Babies in 2025 61,450
Estimated living today 2,40036,000
Median age today 4911
Peak year 19392014
Best rank 784th boys190th girls
Rank in 2025 10,695th225th
First recorded 18841880
Girls / boys 63 / 3,92931,778 / 4,945

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 Prentices alive today are over 49; half the Presleys are over 11. That is 38 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 Prentice Presley
England and Wales 281,213
Scotland 762

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: Prentice and Presley.