Baby Name Trends 2025: What Matters Most Now

Let’s talk about baby name trends 2025.

The updated US popularity data came out on May 9, 2025. It reflects data for all recorded births between January 1st and December 31st of 2024.

Most of these aren’t new. Not really. But they’re dominant themes for how we name our children now, and I think that’s worth knowing.

• If avoiding trends matters, you may want to consider whether your favorite names fit these patterns, and avoid them entirely. This is incredibly challenging. Even when we think we’re sticking with, say, classic names, we often choose the ones that are currently in favor – Henry instead of Dennis, Margot over Anne. But knowing what’s popular in terms of categories and styles can help.
• If finding a distinctive name is a priority, this list points to another approach. Choose your favorite trend, and find something that hasn’t caught on yet. It’s tricky, of course, but a name like Riverlynn fits with Wrenley and Oaklynn, but your daughter still won’t share her name.

On to the trends …

GO WEST: NEO-WESTERN CONTINUES TO RIDE HIGH

Twenty years ago, names like Wyatt, Colton, and Gage sounded at-home-on-the-range. They were little cowboy names. The trend wasn’t exactly new. We’d been borrowing this style from Western-inspired pop culture, especially television, for decades. Names like Heath, Bret, Walker, and Shane were boosted by these characters. But Yellowstone put the neo-Western at center of the American conversation. Thanks to the series’ success, as well as multiple spin-offs that continue the story, names like Kayce (and Kase and Kace) and Lainey have become white hot choices. But so have adjacent names not specifically used in the series, like Stetson and Hallie that share the same vibes.

AI IS EVERYWHERE

The vowel sound, that is. While Kai fell slightly in calendar year 2024, names ending in AI are having a moment. Think Azai, Lorelai, Nikolai … In many ways, it’s just another vowel sound at the end, a slight shift from Riley and Molly’s familiar EE. Except AI is much less familiar in American English, at least at the end of words. It feels twenty-first century forward, an inventive, globally-inspired sound that’s perfect for our children now.

UNISEX NAMES HIT THEIR STRIDE

For years, conventional wisdom held that if a name caught on for a girl, it was ruined for boys. Those days are over, soon to be as distant as paying with cash or getting an actual human being on the phone on the first try. Here’s the thing: we’ve been borrowing from the boys for our daughters’ names for years. What had to change to make unisex names mainstream? Parents of boys had to shrug off any idea that a unisex name would be a problem. Thank you, younger Millennial and Gen Z parents.

COZY AND CASUAL CONTINUE TO RULE

Or maybe that should be cosy, because American parents are very much borrowing from the British with their love of the most diminutive forms of names. It’s not just Charlie and Archie, Millie and Stevie. We’ve added terms of endearment like Honey and Sonny to our list of possibilities, as well as fresh throwback choices like Tilly and Ronnie to the US Top 1000. While this can feel relaxed, it’s worth noting that the impulse can also come from a place of control: we’re choosing our child’s nickname so there’s no ambiguity.

THE SYNTHETIC SURNAME FACTORY IS GOING STRONG

Families have always used surnames to honor loved ones, often as middles, but frequently as firsts, too. It tended to be regional, giving Southern or maybe New England vibes. But then we all decided to choose surname names, not just a few that filtered into mainstream use, but all of them. Mason and Jackson, Harper and Madison became go-to choices. And then something even more interesting happened. We twisted existing names, respelling them to be more name-like or less traditional. Hello, Jaxon and Madisyn. And then we started inventing surnames entirely. Skyler, Maxton, Rylan. Did they sometimes exist before the 21st century? Sure. But mostly, we made them up in a bid to find something just a little different.

NATURE-PLUS NAMES FLOURISH

Building on Synthetic Surnames, Nature-Plus choices take common name elements, like -lee and -lynn, and add them to popular nature names. Wrenlee, Oaklynn, and Lakelyn are some of the best-known examples. Icelynn is a newcomer, along with Rosalee and Wrenleigh. When it comes to baby name trends 2025, I think this is one of ones to watch, particularly because multiple spellings make it tough to pin down popularity.

WORDS ARE NAMES ARE WORDS

If Maverick and Aria are Top 100 choices, we’re much more likely to embrace novel words-as-names like Rowdy and Truce, Lavender and Honey. While we’ve always had a handful of words-as-names on the popularity charts, there’s less resistance to the idea now. It means we ask ourselves “would Halo make a good name?” not “is Halo too much of a word to be a name?” That’s a subtle shift, but it sends us looking to dictionaries and word lists for inspiration. We will continue to find plenty.

MIX-AND-MATCH ELEMENTS GET LONGER

An earlier generation answered to Hailee and Kaylie and Jayla, Jaiden and Brayden and Haden, too. We’ve always mixed and matched names, but it’s easy to forget. (Darlene, Earlene, and Willene called from 1925 to remind us.) Parents today, though, are using much longer mix-and-match elements. Think -amari, -akari, and -iel on the boys’ side; -lani and -iya/-iyah for the girls. One outcome: mix-and-match names tend to come in at three syllables more often than two.

ANYTHING BUT WEST: THE BIGGER PICTURE

If this list started with the swagger of neo-Western names inspired by fictional ranchers, it ends in a very different place. American names have always been diverse, reflecting the ever-changing composition of our nation. That’s even more true now. Names like Jasiel and Kataleya, Soraya and Zaid, Kenzo and Yara reflect global roots. Our backgrounds have never been uniformly Western European, but assimilation to some shifting ideal of white, European(ish) conformity was a powerful force in naming. It’s why my great-grandfather Giuseppe became Joe, and handed down the name Joseph to a younger generation. Today, we’re far more likely to go our own way, celebrating our heritage – whatever that may be – or finding a name that feels like a fit for our particular stories. Is this a trend? I suppose. But it’s also a reminder that the world changes, ready or not, and that a future generation will always see things with fresh eyes.

What do you think of my picks for baby names trends 2025? What would you add to this list?