Tilda vs Tillie

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Tilda Tillie

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 145 years in which either name was published, Tillie for 140 years and Tilda for 5 years. The lead changed hands 8 times.

• 1880–1957 Tillie ahead
• 1958 Tilda ahead
• 1959–1960 Tillie ahead
• 1961 Tilda ahead
• 1962–1963 Tillie ahead
• 1964 Tilda ahead
• 1965 Tillie ahead
• 1966–1967 Tilda ahead
• 1968–2025 Tillie 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 Tildas alive today are over 61; half the Tillies are over 16. That is 45 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Tilda Kentucky (27.1×), Tennessee (12.1×)
• Tillie North Dakota (10.6×), New Mexico (10.3×), South Dakota (2.7×)

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.

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

• Tilda vs Tillman
• Tilda vs Tilly
• Tilda vs Tilden
• Tilda vs Tilman
• Tilda vs Tilford
• Tillie vs Tillman
• Tillie vs Tilly
• Tillie vs Tilden