The spelling wars

In 2008 the most popular boys' name in America was Jacob. 22,507 boys. It had been number one for ten years. That is the official list, and the official list counts spellings.

Count sounds instead and it is not close. In the same year, 31,158 American boys were given a name that is said Aidan. It was spelled 23 different ways. The commonest, Aiden, was 16th on the official list. Aidan was 59th. Ayden was 91st. Not one of them in the top ten, and together they beat Jacob by nearly nine thousand.

We hold the full American birth files for a handful of years, every spelling down to five babies, so we can do this sum properly.

Twenty-three ways to spell it

Here is 2008. Every spelling that begins with an A, has an i, y or e before the d, and ends in n, plus Aden. We left out Adan, which is the Spanish Adán, and Aydin, which is a Turkish name with its own sound. Some of those 1,500 boys are probably Aidens too. We would rather undercount than guess.

Three spellings do almost all the work. Aiden, Aidan and Ayden are 28,277 of the 31,158. The other twenty add up to about the size of a single mid-table name. But they are there, and a few of them, Aidynn, Aydun, Aidann, were given to six or five boys in the whole country. Somebody sat down and invented those.

How it happened

Aidan is the older spelling. It reached the American top thousand in 1990, in 889th place. Aiden followed in 1995 and Ayden in 1999. For the next decade all three climbed together, and the chart below stacks them up against whatever name was officially number one.

Two things happen in 2006. The stack passes Jacob, and Aiden passes Aidan. The sound became the most popular boys' name in America in the same year the respelling took over from the original. From then on the original spelling only falls.

The three spellings peaked in order. Aidan had its best year in 2003, with 10,062 boys. Aiden peaked in 2009 with 16,017. Ayden peaked in 2012 with 6,221. Each respelling arrived later and peaked later, like a wave passing along the name. The smaller ones follow the same pattern: Aidyn peaked in 2011, Aidynn in 2014.

The sound held number one in 2010 as well, 27,324 boys across 29 spellings against Jacob's 21,875. By 2017, the most recent full file we hold, it had slipped to third: 18,224 boys, behind Liam on 18,728 and Noah on 18,326. Aiden alone was 17th that year, with 11,259.

Which spelling is winning

None of them, now. All three are falling in the current American rankings, and the order they have settled into is the interesting part.

Aiden is still comfortably ahead, 62nd this year. Ayden is second. Aidan, the spelling the whole thing started from, is last of the three at 326th, and it was already last in 2010. When a name gets respelled, the respelling does not just catch up. It replaces the original, and the original is the one that goes. Aden was 997th in 2024 and is outside the top thousand this year.

It was not only Aidan

The same decade produced a whole family of names that rhyme with it, and every one of them was fought over the same way. Here they are in 2008, counted by sound.

Jayden beat Jacob too. 28,331 boys across 31 spellings, with Jayden itself 11th. So by sound the top three boys' names in America in 2008 were Aidan, Jayden and Jacob, and nobody published that list. The last column shows where each sound would sit on the official list if it were one name. Give Jacob its own respellings back, Jakob and a few smaller ones, and it reaches about 24,000. Still third.

Kayden is the extreme case. Forty-six spellings. Not one of them in the top ninety. Caden was the best at 95th, then Kaden, Kayden, Cayden and Kaiden. Added up, it would sit fourth on the official list, behind Jacob, Michael and Ethan, and you would never know it from any list. It was still the same in 2017: 40 spellings, best one 98th, sixth once you add them up. If you have found an unusual spelling of Kayden, there are 39 others.

The girls' version

Girls' names have fewer of these wars, and the one that matters has only two sides. Sophia and Sofia are said the same way. In America in 2017 Sophia was fifth, with 14,831 girls, and Sofia was 15th with 8,134. Together, 22,965. Emma, the official number one, had 19,738.

It was true in 2008 as well. Sophia was seventh that year and Sofia 36th, and together they had 22,009 girls against Emma's 18,765. And in 2010, when Sophia was officially second to Isabella, the two spellings had 26,759 girls to Isabella's 22,731. In every full file we hold from 2008 on, the most popular girls' name in America, counted by sound, is Sophia. Sophia is fifth in the current rankings and Sofia ninth.

And here is the bit we did not expect. It is true in England and Wales too. In 2025 Sophia was 13th, with 1,547 girls, and Sofia was 17th with 1,490. Together, 3,037. Olivia, number one again, had 2,386. The year before it was the same: Sofia 12th, Sophia 13th, 3,236 between them against Olivia's 2,761.

So the most popular girls' name in both countries is the same name, and it is not the one either country says it is. Lily nearly does it as well in Britain: second on its own with 2,249, and past Olivia once you add Lilly and Lillie, at 2,836.

Britain sat this one out

The Aidan war never really reached England and Wales. In 2025 there were six spellings in the ONS file and 635 boys between them, which as one name would rank 81st. Aiden had 298, Aidan 171, Ayden 119. All three fell on the year before, and all three are above the fifty-baby line where we trust the ranking.

The proportions are different too. In Britain there are 1.7 Aidens for every Aidan. In America in 2017 there were 6.6. The older spelling held on here in a way it did not over there, which is the same thing we found with Alfie and Alfred in the opposite direction. Britain is slower to change what a name looks like on paper. Kayden, for what it is worth, has twelve spellings in the ONS file and 496 boys.

What it means for you

The rankings you read, ours included, count spellings, because that is what the records hold. A classroom counts sounds. A name that is 17th on paper can be third in the register, and a name that is 95th can be fourth. If you are choosing a spelling because it looks less common, check how many other parents had the same idea. The name pages on this site list the close spellings for exactly that reason.

And if you are picking Sophia because Olivia feels too popular, we have some news.