Baby Names
What's new this year?
Last year the most popular names given to baby girls were:
Last year the most popular names given to baby boys were:
There was very little movement in the Top Ten Girls Names from 2022 to 2023. The only change was Mia moving up two places – which knocked Isabella and Ava each down one in the rankings. There were no new girl names in the Top Ten and no names fell out of the rankings.
The boys had more movement in their name rankings than the girls. The biggest mover was Mateo which joined the Top Ten for the first time. Mateo has been growing in popularity first cracking the Top Twenty in 2020 at 20th place. His name has been rising in popularity every year since. Benjamin fell out of the Top Ten to 11th place as a result.
Other names to watch include William which is down 4 spots and at risk of dropping out of the Top Ten and Theodore which had the second biggest jump in the Top Ten rising 3 places.
For years now, parents have been more likely to give their child a more unique name than previous generations. As a result, the Top Ten baby names now represent a much smaller piece of the overall population than it once did.
In 2023, the Top Ten Baby Names only represented 7.2% of all male births and 6.5% of female births. Compare this to a century earlier where the Top Ten Baby Names represented nearly a third (31.2%) of all male births and nearly a quarter of all female births (22.6%).
The impact of this trend is that even the most popular names are becoming far less common. In 1923, one in twenty male babies had the name John. Fast forward to 2023, and you will only come across one out of a hundred babies with the most popular boy name, Liam.
(Note: Demographics play a role in naming choices. The statics here represent the entire U.S. population, and probability assumes babies selected at random. In everyday experiences, people may find that within their own communities there is more name clustering than found in the overall population.)
| Year | Girls | Boys |
|---|---|---|
| 1923 | 22.56% | 31.23% |
| 1943 | 23.75% | 33.48% |
| 1963 | 15.58% | 28.28% |
| 1983 | 16.91% | 22.83% |
| 2003 | 8.76% | 11.08% |
| 2023 | 6.54% | 7.23% |
This table groups the ten most popular names for the year shown. It then calculates what percentage of all names from that year are represented by the Top Ten grouping.
