One subject, in depth · bridged to FuelFacts
NameCurve
Girls' name · 29,668 recorded births

Imani

#579 in the US in 2025

Where Imani stands

United States register · 1880–2025

#579girls’ names · US 2025

Imani was the 579th most registered girls' name in the United States in 2025, on 512 births.

peak 1998 · 1,222188019532025

Its moment was 1998, when 1,222 babies were given it.

SOURCE·US Social Security Administration, national baby-name data·Public domain. retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified. SSA lists a name only if it was given to at least 5 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

#579US rank, 2025 (girls)
512US births in 2025
#239its best US rank, in 1996
1998peak year — 1,222 births
27,817US births since 1970
422E&W births, 2019–2025
Saved in this browser only — no account, nothing sent anywhere.

How Imani's figures are worked out

  1. Counts come straight from the registrars: the US Social Security Administration (1880–2025) and the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs (1900–2025). Nothing is scraped from another names site. The SSA files are the agency's own, retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified.
  2. Ranks are computed against every name in that year's file, not just the ones this site publishes pages for — otherwise a rank would flatter every name we happen to list.
  3. The curve is drawn on births per 100,000 of that sex, not raw counts. Raw counts across eras are misleading: far more births were registered in 1957 than in 1890, so a flat count is a falling share.
  4. The reporting floor. Each registrar publishes a name only once it clears a threshold — 5 births of that sex in the US, 10 in New Zealand. Expressed as a share that threshold is itself a curve, and it is drawn on every chart here as the shaded band along the base.
  5. A missing year is a suppressed value, never a zero. Where the registrar published nothing, this site prints “below floor” or “<5”, the curve is broken rather than drawn across the gap, and the missing years are marked on the floor line. Imani was under the floor in no year of its US record.
share per 100,000 = births ÷ all births of that sex that year × 100,000
reporting floor (share) = 5 ÷ all births of that sex that year × 100,000

Full methodology →

Imani in the United States

188019001920194019601980200020200.03569
Births per 100,000 of that sex, so eras compare fairly. The shaded band is the 5-birth reporting floor — under it the registrar publishes nothing, so a line that stops has left the record, not fallen to zero. Imani in the United States, 1880–2025
girlsboys

Between 2016 and 2025 the name has been steady.

SOURCE·US Social Security Administration, national baby-name data·Public domain. retrieved from the Internet Archive's 2026 snapshot of ssa.gov (ssa.gov refuses automated requests); files unmodified. SSA lists a name only if it was given to at least 5 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Imani in New Zealand

Imani never reached 10 births in a single year in New Zealand, so it does not appear in the DIA file. That is a reporting floor, not a zero — the name may still have been registered here, just never ten times in one year.

SOURCE·NZ Department of Internal Affairs, births by first name·CC BY 4.0. DIA lists a name only if it was given to at least 10 babies of that sex that year.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Imani in England & Wales

In England and Wales, Imani was registered 422 times between 2019 and 2025, peaking in 2024 with 67 births. It ranked #650 for girls in 2025 on 59 births.

20200.01326
Births per 100,000 of that sex, so eras compare fairly. The shaded band is the 3-birth reporting floor — under it the registrar publishes nothing, so a line that stops has left the record, not fallen to zero. Imani in England and Wales, 2019–2025
girlsboys

Seven years is a window, not a history. Unlike the American and New Zealand series this one cannot show you a name's arrival or its long decline — ONS publishes the full list only from 2019. England and Wales only: Scotland and Northern Ireland publish separately and are not counted here.

SOURCE·Office for National Statistics, baby names in England and Wales·Open Government Licence v3.0. ONS redacts any name given to 2 or fewer babies of that sex that year, under s40 of the Freedom of Information Act.·REVIEWED JUL 2026

Decade by decade in the US

US rank and births at each decade markSSA · JUL 2026
YearRankBirths
1970#5,4139
1980#2,53737
1990#935203
2000#3031,051
2010#372861
2020#522580

<5 = the SSA published no figure for that year. It is a suppressed value, not a zero.

Where in the United States

The states that registered Imani most often since 1970. These are lifetime totals, so they track state population as much as local taste — a name common in Wyoming will never out-count California.

StateBirths
New York3,296
California2,201
Florida1,742
Texas1,699
Georgia1,650
New Jersey1,389
Pennsylvania1,383
Illinois1,360
North Carolina1,257
Virginia1,056

Questions about Imani

How popular is the name Imani?

Imani ranked #579 for girls in the United States in 2025, on 512 births registered with the Social Security Administration.

When was Imani most popular?

Imani peaked in 1998, when 1,222 babies in the United States were given the name.

Is Imani rising or falling?

Measured as a share of all girls' births, Imani has been steady between 2016 and 2025.

Same sex, peaking within a few years of 1998, at a comparable scale. Not a taste engine — this is arithmetic on peak years, which is why it will occasionally hand you something unfashionable that is nonetheless exactly of the period.

SOURCE·US SSA (1880–2025) + NZ DIA (1900–2025) birth registrations·ranks and shares computed from the source files, see method·REVIEWED JUL 2026

See what every site in this family answers

Published by

Amit Sharma

Auckland real-estate agent and marketer. Builds free, sourced data tools.