Olivia Isn't the Most Popular Girls' Name

Every name below is a group of spellings that sound identical. Olivia has no homophone spellings in common use, so its total is unchanged. It is overtaken by names whose registrations were spread across more than one spelling.

Sophie is not Sophia. It is said differently, so it is counted separately, and it holds its place at 63rd in both versions of the chart. The rule throughout is strict: same sound, same name. Nothing else qualifies.

These names are not in the ONS top 100, but they would be if spellings that sound alike were counted together. Their registrations are divided, so no single spelling clears the bar. Nine are listed below; the tenth is Sara (840, 53rd), which we have held back because it illustrates the limits of this method rather neatly — more on that at the end.

Hannah is the starkest case. It is absent from the ONS hundred, yet counted by sound it would be the 48th most popular girls' name in England and Wales — ahead of names that make headlines every year. Its commonest spelling accounts for less than half its own total.

The corollary is less comfortable. Seven names sit in the ONS hundred while names below them are divided across spellings. Group by sound, and they fall below the line: Darcie (102nd), Scarlett (104th), Rosa (104th), Marnie (107th), Alba (111th), Lara (113th) and Frankie (114th). Nothing about these names has changed. Only the competition around them has been recounted.

Run the same exercise on the boys and the top of the chart hardly shifts. Muhammad stays first. The top twelve stay in almost exactly the same order. Where the girls' podium is rewritten, the boys' is untouched.

Beneath the top twelve, though, the boys' chart fragments just as much — it does so lower down. Seven names would climb into the top 100 on merged spellings, and the most striking is Rayan, which does not appear in the ONS top 100 at all. Its 715 registrations are split across seven spellings — Rayan, Rayyan, Rayaan, Raiyan, Reyan, Rayen, Rayyaan — and not one is common enough to chart alone. Counted as a single name, it would be the 81st most popular boys' name in England and Wales. Zayn (799, five spellings) would arrive at 69th; Remy (750) would arrive at 73rd, with Cody (88th), Mateo (90th), Raphael (93rd) and Lenny (100th) behind it. Quieter climbs go to Caleb (75th, once Kaleb is counted with it) and Milo (78th, with Mylo). Out would go Bobby, Carter, Vincent, Ralph, Stanley and Nathan.

The difference is where the fragmentation bites. Boys' names splinter in the middle of the chart; girls' names splinter at the very top. That is why counting by sound rewrites the girls' podium and leaves the boys' alone — and why “the most popular girls' name” is a slipperier phrase than its boys' equivalent.

One measure of how far a name is divided: how much of its own total its commonest spelling holds. The lower the figure, the more thoroughly the name is split.

A different question is which name is written the most different ways, and the answer is not the same. Cody is spelled eight ways — Cody, Kody, Kodi, Kodie, Codi, Codie, Codey and Coady — and Maya seven. But both have one dominant spelling that holds over three-quarters of the total, so the long tail of variants barely dents their ranking. Plenty of spellings is not the same thing as a genuinely divided name.

The mirror image is a small group of names with no homophone variant anywhere in the register — not one alternative spelling that sounds the same, at any level of recorded popularity. For these, the ONS ranking and the sound-based ranking are the same number.

This is a narrower claim than it sounds, and worth stating carefully. Plenty of top-100 names have variants that merely look related: George has Georgie, Georgi and Jorge on the register, and none of them merges, because none is routinely pronounced like George. The names above have nothing at all — no rival spelling of the same sound. Florence at 5th and Charlotte at 25th rank identically however you count.

The practical lesson: choosing a different spelling does not make a name rarer. If you liked Sophia but picked Sofia to avoid the crowd, you did not avoid the crowd — you joined the most common girls' name in England and Wales by another door. Your daughter will still share her name, out loud, with three thousand others.

The reverse holds too. A name outside the ONS hundred is not necessarily unusual: Hannah and Amira are both more common, spoken aloud, than the published list suggests. If you want a genuinely uncommon name, the number to weigh is not the rank of the spelling but the rank of the sound.

We hold a pronunciation for every name in our database, written in phonemes. We took the ONS 2025 registration counts, reduced each name to its pronunciation, grouped the names whose pronunciations are identical, summed the counts and re-ranked. The ONS counts themselves are unaltered throughout: every number here is theirs. All we have changed is what gets treated as one name.

To be clear about what this is and isn't: the ONS is not doing this wrong. Counting spellings exactly as registered is the right approach for a statistical record, and the ONS says plainly that this is what its figures represent. Grouping by sound answers a different question, and it is a question with no objectively correct answer. Ours is one defensible way to slice it, not the definitive one.

The rule is homophones only, and the line is drawn deliberately tightly. Sophia and Sofia merge because they are pronounced identically. Sophia and Sophie do not. Nor do Muhammad and Mohammed: they are transliterations of the same name, but they are said differently, and once you start merging names that are “really the same” despite sounding different, there is no principled place to stop. Pronunciation is the test, and nothing else is.

The method has two weaknesses, and both are worth stating plainly.

The first is names with more than one pronunciation. Sara is the clearest example: in England and Wales it is said both SAIR-a, identical to Sarah, and SAH-ra, rhyming with Zara. One spelling, two sounds — and a birth register records the letters, not the voice. We have to pick a single pronunciation for Sara, and whichever we pick is wrong for a large number of the children who have it. That is why Sara sits at 53rd in our chart with an asterisk we cannot remove.

The second runs the opposite way: two names that our phonetic alphabet cannot tell apart. Molly and Mali are transcribed with the same vowel, so they group together, and Molly's 729 registrations include 132 for a name most people would say is a different one. The alphabet is not fine-grained enough to separate them, and we would rather admit that than fudge the transcription to get the answer we expected.

Where we could not be confident how a name is actually said, we left it ungrouped rather than guess. But the honest position is that our chart, like the ONS chart, is an approximation of something a register cannot measure at all.

A few individual calls are marginal too. Aria and Arya are merged, which lifts Aria to 14th; a reasonable person could dispute it. If you want to see how any individual name has moved over time, every name above links to its full popularity history. And for the year's risers and fallers as the ONS itself ranks them, see our 2025 movers and shakers.