Humanverse

Sunny vs Sunya

American parents have registered 17,697 Sunnys since 1880, against 111 Sunyas. Sunny is still ahead, with 998 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Sunny against Sunya, 1880 to 2025 0 300 600 900 1.2k 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Sunny 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

Sunny has been the commoner name in every year either was published, 1900 to 2025. The lead has never changed hands.

The closest they came was 1927, when Sunny had 20 and Sunya had 14.

Side by side

  Sunny Sunya
Total US births 17,697111
Most in one year 1,05714
Babies in 2025 998under 5
Estimated living today 16,00080
Median age today 1851
Peak year 20241927
Best rank 370th girls2,433rd girls
Rank in 2025 389thunranked
First recorded 19001927
Girls / boys 13,191 / 4,506111 / 0

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 Sunnys are over 18. That is 33 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.

Country Sunny Sunya
England and Wales 1,46912

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: Sunny and Sunya.