Humanverse

Sade vs Sadie

American parents have registered 149,922 Sadies since 1880, against 10,102 Sades. Sadie is still ahead, with 4,168 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Sade Sadie

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 146 years in which either name was published, Sadie for 141 years and Sade for 5 years. The lead changed hands 2 times.

Side by side

  Sade Sadie
Total US births 10,102149,922
Most in one year 1,2594,871
Babies in 2025 1004,168
Estimated living today 9,90099,000
Median age today 3212
Peak year 19862014
Best rank 213th girls46th girls
Rank in 2025 2,051st50th
First recorded 19851880
Girls / boys 9,981 / 121149,681 / 241

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 Sades alive today are over 32; half the Sadies are over 12. That is 20 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 Sade Sadie
England and Wales 5938,818
France 11530

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: Sade and Sadie.