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Rona vs Ronan

American parents have registered 20,938 Ronans since 1880, against 5,444 Ronas. Ronan is still ahead, with 1,428 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Rona against Ronan, 1880 to 2025 0 400 800 1.2k 1.6k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Rona Ronan

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 118 years in which either name was published, Rona for 87 years and Ronan for 31 years. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Rona Ronan
Total US births 5,44420,938
Most in one year 1531,428
Babies in 2025 under 51,428
Estimated living today 4,10021,000
Median age today 617
Peak year 19662025
Best rank 800th girls247th boys
Rank in 2025 unranked247th
First recorded 18961959
Girls / boys 5,444 / 0259 / 20,679

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 Ronas alive today are over 61; half the Ronans are over 7. 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 Rona Ronan
France 6016,195
Ireland 6110,334
England and Wales 2153,888
Scotland 3681,278
Switzerland 34477
Belgium 14243

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: Rona and Ronan.