Walden vs Wally

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Walden Wally

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 116 years in which either name was published, Wally for 95 years and Walden for 21 years. The lead changed hands 8 times.

• 1908 Walden ahead
• 1910–1914 Wally ahead
• 1915–1916 Walden ahead
• 1917–2000 Wally ahead
• 2001 Walden ahead
• 2002–2007 Wally ahead
• 2008 Walden ahead
• 2009 Wally ahead
• 2010–2025 Walden 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 Wallys alive today are over 63; half the Waldens are over 12. That is 51 years between them: two names in use at the same time, worn by two different generations.

Where each one is strongest

• Walden California (4.6×)
• Wally Idaho (3.4×), Illinois (2.8×), Washington (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

• Walden vs Walter
• Walden vs Wallace
• Walden vs Walker
• Walden vs Walton
• Walden vs Waldo
• Wally vs Walter
• Wally vs Wallace
• Wally vs Walker