The names Britain and America can't agree on

Freddie is the tenth most popular boys' name in England and Wales. 2,526 babies got it last year. In America it does not make the top thousand.

Not the top hundred. The top thousand. In 2017, the last full year of American records we hold, 76 babies in the whole of the United States were named Freddie. That is a country with six times the births of England and Wales, and it managed 76.

We hold the official birth records for both countries side by side, so we can put a number on this for every name in the catalogue. Once you do that, a pattern falls out that is not really about individual names at all. It is about two different ideas of what a name is for.

Britain calls the baby Alfie

Here are the names most lopsidedly British. The number is how many times more common the name is in England and Wales than in America, once you allow for the two countries' sizes.

Read down the left-hand column and the pattern is hard to miss. Albie, Alfie, Vinnie, Freddie, Reggie, Archie, Lottie, Darcie. Eight of the twelve are what an American would call a nickname. In Britain they go on the birth certificate.

An American parent who likes the sound of Alfie names the boy Alfred and calls him Alfie at home. A British parent skips the Alfred. That is the whole difference, and it is worth 442 to one. Albie is the extreme case. 1,702 babies in England and Wales. Sixteen in America. Per head, 649 times more British.

The other four are the opposite kind of name. Rupert, Wilfred, Ottilie and Orla. Old, formal, a bit grand. Britain kept them and America let them go. Both halves of the list are Britain being comfortable with a name sounding either more casual or more old fashioned than an American would risk.

America calls the baby Kingston

Now the other direction. The names most lopsidedly American.

Different list, different idea. Kinsley, Sawyer, Easton, Braxton, Kingston, Remington. Six of the twelve are surnames. Not surnames from the family, in the way a British family might use a grandmother's maiden name. Surnames chosen for the sound of them. Remington is a rifle company. Kingston is a place. Sawyer is a job.

Then there are the names that are simply words or places. London was given to 2,230 American babies in 2017. Six babies in England and Wales, the country it is in. Londyn, with a y, another 1,627. We are not going to pretend to know what that says. We can tell you it happened.

Jesus is at the top of the list and it is the easiest to explain. In Spanish-speaking families it is an ordinary first name, and America has a great many more of those than England and Wales does. 2,741 babies against three.

A word on the years

The British figures are from 2025. The American figures are from 2017, which is the most recent full national file we hold. That is an eight year gap and we would rather say so than hope you do not notice.

It matters less than it looks. A name that is 649 times more common in one country than the other is not going to become evenly matched because one side's figure is a few years old. Where it could matter is a name that was climbing fast in America after 2017, and for those the American count here is an undercount. If anything the true gaps on the British list are a little smaller than shown, and the gaps on the American list a little bigger.

One name on the American list deserves its own warning. Alexa was given to 3,888 American babies in 2017. You may have a theory about what happened to it after that. So do we. But our American figures stop in 2017, so we cannot show it, and we are not going to write a paragraph about a trend we cannot see.

Where the two countries agree

After all that, the top of the charts looks surprisingly alike. Olivia is the most popular girls' name in both countries. Noah is second for boys in both. Of the twenty names in the American top ten for each sex, nineteen are in the British top hundred.

The other way round is where it gets interesting. Of the British top ten, only twelve of twenty make the American top hundred. Freddie, as we said, is tenth here and outside the top thousand there. And Muhammad is the most popular boys' name in England and Wales, given to 5,957 babies last year, and 239th in America.

So the honest summary is this. When the two countries agree, they agree completely, right down to the same name at number one. When they disagree, Britain has usually shortened something and America has usually borrowed a surname. And nobody in America is calling their son Albie.