Zebedee vs Zebediah

Babies given each name, 1880–2025

Zebedee Zebediah

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 114 years in which either name was published, Zebedee for 82 years and Zebediah for 32 years. The lead changed hands 10 times.

• 1907–1977 Zebedee ahead
• 1978–1979 Zebediah ahead
• 1980–1983 Zebedee ahead
• 1984 Zebediah ahead
• 1985–1987 Zebedee ahead
• 1988 Zebediah ahead
• 1989–1990 Zebedee ahead
• 1991–1992 Zebediah ahead
• 1993–1995 Zebedee ahead
• 1996–2021 Zebediah ahead
• 2022–2025 Zebedee 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 Zebedees alive today are over 36; half the Zebediahs are over 18. That is 18 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

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• Zebedee vs Zeb
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• Zebediah vs Zeb
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• Zebediah vs Zebadiah
• Zebediah vs Zebulun