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Sole vs Soleil

American parents have registered 5,172 Soleils since 1880, against 561 Soles. Soleil is still ahead, with 370 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Sole against Soleil, 1880 to 2025 0 100 200 300 400 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Sole Soleil

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

Soleil has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1981 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 2000, when Sole had 46 and Soleil had 90.

Side by side

  Sole Soleil
Total US births 5615,172
Most in one year 46370
Babies in 2025 18370
Estimated living today 5605,100
Median age today 1611
Peak year 20002025
Best rank 3,020th girls756th girls
Rank in 2025 6,325th756th
First recorded 19991981
Girls / boys 561 / 05,130 / 42

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 Soles alive today are over 16; half the Soleils are over 11. That is 5 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 Sole Soleil
Italy 4,7171,903
Switzerland 89107
England and Wales 4108
France 2585

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: Sole and Soleil.