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Salma vs Salvador

American parents have registered 49,788 Salvadors since 1880, against 10,316 Salmas. Salvador is still ahead, with 341 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Salma against Salvador, 1880 to 2025 0 250 500 750 1k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Salma Salvador

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

Salvador has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1888 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2017, when Salma had 362 and Salvador had 379.

Side by side

  Salma Salvador
Total US births 10,31649,788
Most in one year 442929
Babies in 2025 278341
Estimated living today 10,00040,000
Median age today 1632
Peak year 19991992
Best rank 569th girls291st boys
Rank in 2025 936th754th
First recorded 19181888
Girls / boys 10,311 / 5183 / 49,605

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 Salvadors alive today are over 32; half the Salmas are over 16. That is 16 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 Salma Salvador
France 10,3252,125
Spain 7,977359
England and Wales 2,715323
Belgium 2,04111
Switzerland 355267
Poland 16329
Ireland 677

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: Salma and Salvador.