Irish names beyond St. Patrick's Day

Before the names

From anglicized favorites to bravely spelled Saoirse, these Irish names are in genuine US use today.

Start with the scale of it: Liam first appeared in the US records only in 1947 and has been the single most popular boys' name in America since 2017. No import in the modern records has traveled further, faster — and Nora, on the girls' side, stands this year at the highest rank of her entire record, back to 1880.

This is at least the third Irish wave, and the records keep all of them. The midcentury Irish-American generation — Patrick peaking in 1964, Kevin in 1963, Brian in 1970, Sean in 1972, Erin in 1983 — now rests well down the chart, worn by the parents and grandparents of today's babies. Each era's favorites read as their era.

Today's wave draws from a different well: genuinely Irish names rather than Irish-American ones. Maeve — absent from US records before 1940 — sits at #76 and rising; Declan, Rory, Ronan and Finn all chart comfortably; Cillian, in its Irish spelling, has climbed inside the top-510. The movement runs toward Ireland, not away from it.

The frontier is real and measurable: Saoirse entered the records only in 1993 and charts near #1085 — beloved, rare, and spelled exactly as Dublin spells it. Between Liam at #1 and Saoirse at #1085, this page holds the entire arc an import can travel, with each name's position marked.