Sunni vs Sunya

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Sunni Sunya

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 79 years in which either name was published, Sunni for 75 years and Sunya for 4 years. The lead changed hands once.

• 1927–1947 Sunya ahead
• 1949–2025 Sunni ahead

Side by side

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 Sunyas alive today are over 51; half the Sunnis are over 28. That is 23 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Both names abroad

Countries whose statistics office publishes both names, so the comparison can be made somewhere other than the United States.

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

• Sunni vs Sunny
• Sunni vs Sunshine
• Sunni vs Sunday
• Sunni vs Sunnie
• Sunni vs Sun
• Sunni vs Sunil
• Sunya vs Sunny
• Sunya vs Sunshine