America's top 100 names right now

Before the names

Use it to see the landscape before you pick, to check where a favorite stands, or to know exactly what to expect in a kindergarten five years from now.

The top of the chart moves slowly and in plain sight. Olivia has led the girls' list since 2019 and Liam the boys' since 2017 — and while reigns of that length were once unremarkable (Michael held #1 for thirty-eight consecutive years, 1961 through 1998), they are now the exception. The country's choices simply spread wider than they used to.

Read the girls' column aloud and one sound dominates: eight of the current top ten end in -a, with Sophia and Sofia charting separately inside it. The boys' column tells a different story — Theodore and Henry, top-10 fixtures of the 1880s, are back at #4 and #5, sitting beside Mateo and Luca, imports the old chart never held.

Watch for the doubles. Madelyn and Madeline, Miles and Myles, Luca and Luka, Theodore and Theo all hold separate lines here, so a sound can be considerably more common on the playground than any single rank suggests. If you are counting future classmates, count the spellings together.

The scale is worth knowing too: the latest year gave Liam to more than 20,000 boys and Olivia to more than 13,000 girls, while the names at #100 were given closer to 3,000 times each. Everything on this page is popular by definition — but the top and the bottom of it differ by a factor of five or six, which is the real distance between the most common name in class and a name everyone simply knows.