Vinnie's jump is the story of the year on the boys' side — and a quiet embarrassment for us, since our own forecast had left it for dead at 90th. It belongs to a broader run on warm, faintly cheeky short forms that we'll come back to. Mabel, meanwhile, has done the rarer thing: climbed and broken into the top twenty, the first properly vintage name to manage it in years.

Bonnie's 32-place slide is the sharpest fall on either list, unpicking a long, steady climb in a single year — and, as it happens, the name that wrecked our forecast. Jaxon is the boys' equivalent: the modern respelling of Jackson shedding twenty-two places, which is roughly what happens to a respelling once the original reasserts itself.

Eleven names entered the top 100 that weren't there in 2024. The highest debut belongs to Eliana, straight in at 62nd — an unusual feat, since new entries normally creep in around the relegation zone rather than mid-table.

If one theme runs through the risers, it's the great-grandmother revival showing no sign of tiring. Mabel leads it into the top twenty; Nancy, Margot, Ada, Elsie and Maeve are all holding or climbing around them. These are names that would have looked at home on a 1925 birth register, and a century later they're doing it again — the naming equivalent of buying your gran's sideboard back at auction.

The other clear pattern is the nickname promoted to full name. Vinnie and Ronnie are the boys' standard-bearers — short, warm, faintly Peaky Blinders — with Reggie, Freddie and Alfie in close company. The girls answer with Gracie, Marnie and Hallie. What's striking is that the diminutive is now the name on the certificate in its own right, not the affectionate form of a longer one.

Lyra, up 13 to 70th, barely existed as a name before Philip Pullman, and every fresh screen outing for His Dark Materials gives it another nudge. Proof — if the Bonnie and Jaxon falls hadn't already supplied it — that a name's fortunes in any given year are rarely about the name in isolation.

Strip away Olivia and Muhammad, who haven't budged, and the movement underneath is consistent: vintage charm rising, respellings falling, nicknames going legitimate, and the odd name arriving from nowhere on the back of a television series. Every name above links to its full popularity history if you'd rather see the whole trajectory than a single year's jump — and if you missed it, our scorecard grading these predictions shows which of these moves we saw coming, and which caught us out.