Humanverse

Sim vs Simon

American parents have registered 70,444 Simons since 1880, against 1,933 Sims. Simon is still ahead, with 1,529 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

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

Sim Simon

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

Simon 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 1882, when Sim had 33 and Simon had 78.

Side by side

  Sim Simon
Total US births 1,93370,444
Most in one year 401,653
Babies in 2025 under 51,529
Estimated living today 48057,000
Median age today 6619
Peak year 19182015
Best rank 1,079th boys235th boys
Rank in 2025 unranked230th
First recorded 18801880
Girls / boys 0 / 1,933161 / 70,283

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 Sims alive today are over 66; half the Simons are over 19. That is 47 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 Sim Simon
France 595,190
Belgium 129,837

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: Sim and Simon.