Two things are happening at once, and the second is less obvious than the first. The first is straightforward demography. At the 2021 Census, 3.9 million people in England and Wales identified as Muslim — 6.5% of the population, up from 4.9% a decade earlier. This is not simply a migration story, though: more than half of British Muslims (51%) were born in the UK, and the community has a notably young age profile, so it accounts for a larger share of births than its 6.5% population figure alone would suggest. The name also has a long British history to build on — it first entered the top 100 in the 1920s and has been given to babies in England and Wales in every decade since.

The second factor is the one the headlines usually miss. The prevelence of Muhammad reaching number one is as much sue to how everyone else names their children as because of any single community. Across the wider population, tastes have splintered: parents reach for an ever-wider spread of names, so no single choice gathers many registrations. Within Muslim families, by contrast, there is far less variation, because naming a son after the Prophet is a shared and deeply held tradition. As the population studies expert David Voas has put it, a high proportion of Muslim boys are given the name in one form or another, while for everyone else there is simply a huge range. Add falling birth numbers overall — fewer boys are born each year than a decade ago — and a name reaches the summit on totals that would once have left it mid-table.

Curiously, the same devotion doesn't concentrate girls' names anywhere near as sharply. There is no female equivalent of Muhammad. Maryam, Layla, Zara and Fatima all sit inside the top 100, but none climbs near the summit, and behind them trails a long tail of Quranic and virtue names — Aisha, Zahra, Zainab, Khadija — just outside it. The reason is a wider pool: where boys converge on the Prophet, girls draw on a whole tradition of revered women, flowers and virtues. Devotion concentrates the sons; variety spreads the daughters.

For many families the choice is an act of devotion rather than fashion. It is common for Muhammad to be given as an honorific first name, with a second name used day to day — so a boy registered as Muhammad may well be known to friends and teachers as something else entirely. That custom is part of why the name concentrates so strongly at the top: it is chosen again and again, because it is not susceptable to trend cycles in the way that many other names can be.

Because the name travels into English from Arabic, there is no single correct way to render it in the Latin alphabet — only different transliterations, shaped by region and by which form parents grew up seeing. Counted together, the leading spellings have effectively topped the boys' list for years; counted separately, as ONS does, they spread across the rankings, with Muhammad leading while Mohammed and Mohammad hold their own places in the top 100. If you like the sound but want to see where it sits among neighbours, you can explore names with a similar feel.

The everyday short form in Britain is Mo — worn lightly and warmly by two of the country's best-loved athletes, which has done no harm at all to its friendliness. Beyond nicknames, Muhammad sits at the head of a whole family of names drawn from the same root, all circling the idea of praise.

Names often follow admiration, and this one has no shortage of admired bearers. The Prophet Muhammad is the enduring reason for its significance; alongside that, a run of beloved public figures has kept the name and its variants familiar and warmly regarded far beyond Muslim communities.

Whether you are drawn to it for faith, for family, or simply because it is a strong and handsome name, Muhammad is a choice with deep roots and a firm place at the top of the British charts. You can trace its full climb up the rankings year by year, or use the generator below to see it alongside first names and sibling names that sit well with it.