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Tenaya vs Tenzin

American parents have registered 2,906 Tenzins since 1880, against 1,008 Tenayas. Tenzin is still ahead, with 99 babies in 2025.

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Births per year: Tenaya against Tenzin, 1880 to 2025 0 40 80 120 160 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020

Tenaya Tenzin

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 54 years in which either name was published, Tenzin for 29 years and Tenaya for 25 years. The lead changed hands once.

Side by side

  Tenaya Tenzin
Total US births 1,0082,906
Most in one year 43141
Babies in 2025 under 599
Estimated living today 9902,900
Median age today 2812
Peak year 19752014
Best rank 2,023rd girls1,751st boys
Rank in 2025 unranked2,230th
First recorded 19711992
Girls / boys 1,008 / 01,253 / 1,653

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 Tenayas alive today are over 28; half the Tenzins are over 12. 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 Tenaya Tenzin
France 10615
England and Wales 10146

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: Tenaya and Tenzin.