Ivy-Rose, Elsie-Mae, Arlo-James: Britain’s double names

The most popular double name in England and Wales is Ivy-Rose. In 2025 it went to 185 girls. That puts it 253rd. You would never spot it in a top 100.

But add up every girl with a hyphen in her first name and you get 7,732. That is one girl in 33. And 2,566 of them had Rose as the second half. That is more girls than were called Olivia, the number one girls' name, with 2,386.

How we counted

The Office for National Statistics publishes every first name given to three or more babies in England and Wales, boys and girls separately, spelled exactly as it was registered. We counted every name in the 2025 files with a hyphen in it. Ivy-Rose counts. Ivy with Rose as a middle name does not, because middle names are not in the files.

A double name given to only one or two babies does not appear at all, and there are a lot of those. Four in ten of the girls we did count have a double name shared with fewer than ten others. So every total in this article is a floor. The real number is higher.

Rose, Mae and Rae

The first half of a double name can be almost anything. We found 312 different ones for girls. The second half is a much shorter list. Only 46 different words, and three of them do most of the work. Rose, Mae and Rae between them are the second half for 5,404 girls, seven in every ten.

Fifteen double names went to 50 or more girls in 2025. Every one of them ends in Rose or Mae. After Ivy-Rose come Isla-Rose (94 girls), Delilah-Rose (91), Elsie-Mae (90) and Ivy-Mae (84).

These words do far better as second halves than as names. Rose on its own went to 666 girls. As a second half it went to nearly four times that. Mae on its own went to 108 girls, and as a second half to 1,867, which is 17 times as many. Grace is the exception. It is a big name in its own right, 27th, and more girls get it alone than as a second half.

Which names get one

Some popular names pick up a second half all the time. Others almost never do. We took every girls' name given to 500 or more girls, alone or with a hyphen after it, and worked out how often it came with a second half.

Ivy comes top. Of 2,155 girls given Ivy, 457 had something after it. That is more than one in five. Gracie and Darcie are close behind, at nearly one in five.

At the other end, Florence went to 1,929 girls, fifth in the country, and only five of them were double names. Charlotte had three. Maeve, Grace, Alice, Sophie and Emma had none at all.

Short names lean towards a second half. The five girls' names of three letters in our list had one 12% of the time. The eight of eight letters or more, 2%. In between there is no tidy pattern, so we would not push that very far. The figures show which names get a second half. They do not tell us why.

Boys: one in 120

Boys get double names too, just far fewer. 2,278 boys in England and Wales had a hyphen in their first name in 2025, one in 120. Only two boys' double names went to 50 or more: Tommy-Lee with 60 and Arlo-James with 57.

The boys' second halves follow the same pattern as the girls'. James comes first with 657 boys. Lee is second with 419, and on its own Lee went to just 27 boys. Tommy gets a second half more than any other big boys' name, nearly one time in ten. George, seventh in the country with 3,082 boys, never did.

Nearly 300 of the boys have a name like Abdur-Rahman or Muhammad-Yusuf, where the hyphen joins the parts of an Arabic name. On the girls' side about 160 have Nur or Noor as one half, as in Ayah-Nur. They are in the totals, because the rule is the hyphen, but they are a small part of them.

America does it far less

The American files cannot show a hyphen. There is not one in any of the American files we hold. A double name only shows up there when it is written as one word, like Bellarose, which went to 86 American girls in 2017.

So we counted those. Girls whose name is another girls' name with rose or mae on the end came to 942 in America in 2017, about one girl in 1,800. The same count in England and Wales in 2025, hyphens included, is 4,439, about one girl in 57. That makes them about 30 times as common here per head. The years are different, because 2017 is the newest American count we hold. And an American girl called Ella with Rose as her middle name is invisible in these files, just as she would be here.

Fewer than last year

In 2024 the count was 8,352 girls, one in 31. In 2025 it fell to 7,732. That is a drop of 7%, while the number of girls born fell by 2%. Most of the fall was Rose, down from 2,947 to 2,566. Mae stayed level and Rae went up. Double names for boys fell faster than boys' births too. That is one year, and one year is not a trend. Rose beat Olivia in both years.

What it means for you

A double name lets you keep a popular first name and still end up with something rare. Isla is fourth in England and Wales, with 1,959 girls. Isla-Rose went to 94. Arlo is 15th for boys. Arlo-James went to 57.

If you want the second half to stand out, though, Rose and Mae are the crowded choices. A girl called Elsie-Mae will meet a lot of other girls whose name ends the same way. For the long and the short of first names, see Brittany to Ivy: how baby names got long, then short.