The Definitive US Baby Name Popularity and Androgyny Update for 2025

By Philip N. Cohen

For much too much more, follow the names tag. Data and Stata code are here.

Proving that we don’t need democracy to have baby name data, the Social Security Administration continued to put out their annual baby name numbers in 2026. So, here are some 2025 winners and losers, androgyny trends, and Mary finally stepping over Nevaeh.

Winners and losers

The top 20 boy list is boring, but some interesting developments on the girl side. Charlotte has risen from fourth to second place, and is very close to unseating Olivia, who has been the top girl since 2019. Charlotte was a 300-ranked name in the 1980s and 1990s, and has climbed since about 2000. Around 2004, I decided it would be good to give a baby a rising name, so there would be a lot of kids looking up to her as she grew up. My guess was right that Charlotte would keep rising, but I have no way to assess my theory of its effects on a girl born in 2004. (No guaranteed victories, though; Ava got as high as third but is now tanking.)

The other crazy leap is Ailany, who continues to rocket upward, from 311 girls in 2023 to 2,606 in 2024 and now 7,136, for 14th place on the girl chart. No idea what’s going on with that. Note also, as last year, if you combine Sophia and Sofia she would be the number one girl.

To get a manageable list of recognizable names with big movement, I show the biggest percent changes among those with at least 1000 babies born. The winners on this list are Ailany for girls (as she was last year), and Eithan (possibly popularized by Eithan Arelius in the Cradle series).

Here are the biggest losers, in percentage terms, again for those with 1,000 or more births. There are some heavy hitters on this losing list, especially Luna for girls, and Aiden and Dylan for boys. I’m not a phonetics expert, but these fit a pattern. For girls, ee-sound endings, including Ailany, are rising (7/20 winners, 3/20 losers), while ah-sound endings, including Luna, are falling (12/20 losers, 7/20 winners). For boys, en-sound endings are losing, like Aiden/Ayden and Dylan (12/20 losers, 6/20 winners). Fashion takes no prisoners.

Last year I noted a sharp decline in boys named Zion and Israel in 2024, the first full year after the October 7, 2023 attack and the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. The 2025 data shows they remain depressed, but Israel dropped further. Those names are most common among Black (especially Zion) and Latino families: Israel was in the top 100 names in Mexico in 2023, but has since dropped out, according to Baby Center; Zion became popular after Lauryn Hill named her son (who is also Bob Marley’s grandson) Zion, and had a beautiful hit song about him in 1998, and Zion has long been associated with Black Christian churches. Now the number of boys given the name Israel has dropped 30 percent in just two years.

Androgyny

Here’s the androgyny report. In the 1970s, about 2% of babies were given names in the androgynous range of 20-80% sex-dominant. That rose to 6.4% in 2022 (the teal line below), before falling back to 5.8%. The brown line is the “index of androgyny” proposed by Lieberson et al. who describe it like this: “For the name of every individual girl born in a given year, the boys’ proportion of children with that name. The index gives the average of all these proportions.” That index also peaked in 2022, at 4.7%, and has now slipped back to 4.4%. Whether this backsliding on androgyny continues will be interesting to watch.

Here are the most popular truly androgynous names, those between 40% and 60% single-sex. As they were last year, Parker and Charlie are at the top (of course it’s Parker Charlie, not Charlie Parker). This list is remarkably similar to last year’s with only one new entrant (Campbell) and one exit (Ari).

Mary lives

Finally, the resurrection of Mary, as reflected in the demise of Nevaeh. My interest in names goes back to 2009 or so, when I began looking for ways to understand family diversity, and learned of the rise in diversity among baby names. In 2009, when I blogged at Huffington Post (before you were born), I wrote, “On Naming Diversity, or Why We Never Asked if Mary Had Jumped the Shark.” It seemed to me that people named their girls Mary for traditional reasons (in the sense of not needing a reason), while they used names like Nevaeh (heaven spelled backwards, a trend started by a country music singer) to perform their Christianness. I used to shock people by telling them that newborn Nevaehs outnumbered Marys. But now the two-decade humiliation for Mary is over, and Mary leads by 402 babies, 2230 to 1828 in 2025. Onward Christian parents.

For my old book, Enduring Bonds, I used first-name data from the U.S. Census to estimate the percentage of U.S.-born baby girls named Mary back to 1780 (the Social Security data starts with 1880). At the peak in 1840-1850, it was one-in-seven girls. If you’re reading this, you probably can’t imagine living with that level of cultural conformity. And if you just followed the rankings for the next century, you might not have noticed how much Mary had declined before 1961, the last year she was at number 1. The number one name for girls today, Olivia, is only one-third as popular as Mary was in 1961 — at less than 8 out of every 1,000 new births in 2025. Now Mary is at just 1.3 per thousand, but the crash has leveled off. As long as Christianity has grit, Mary has a chance.