Olivia and Liam topped the SSA’s 2025 baby name list for the seventh straight year. Here’s what the full data reveals about how American parents are naming their children.
Every May, just before Mother’s Day, the Social Security Administration releases the most anticipated list in American parenthood: the year’s most popular baby names, compiled from Social Security card applications submitted at birth. The 2025 list dropped on May 8, 2026, and it confirmed what many parents have come to expect. For the seventh consecutive year, Olivia and Liam held the top spots. No pair of names has dominated the SSA rankings this consistently in the modern era of diverse naming. Understanding what drove them there, and what the shifting ranks below them signal, is worth a close look.
Olivia’s Seven-Year Reign
Olivia is derived from the Latin oliva, meaning olive or olive tree. The olive branch has signaled peace across Mediterranean cultures for millennia, and the name itself was literary before it was popular: William Shakespeare introduced Olivia as a noble countess in Twelfth Night in 1602. For three centuries it lived in moderate use across the English-speaking world, surfacing periodically without ever breaking through to true mass adoption.
Its modern climb is a story of accumulated cultural momentum. The actress Olivia Newton-John, whose global profile peaked with Grease in 1978, introduced the name to a new generation of parents. A second surge followed when Raven-Symoné played young Olivia Kendall on The Cosby Show beginning in 1989. By 2008, Olivia had reached number one in England and Wales. It took until 2019 to reach the top spot in the United States, and it has not left since.
The 2025 top ten for girls: Olivia, Charlotte, Emma, Amelia, Sophia, Mia, Isabella, Evelyn, Sofia, and Eliana.
Charlotte’s climb to number two is one of the year’s most significant shifts. Charlotte climbed to the No. 2 spot for girls, ending Emma’s six-year streak as runner-up. Emma is a Germanic name meaning “whole” or “universal,” embedded in the American top five since the early 2000s. Charlotte is its French feminine counterpart to Charles, itself derived from the Old High German karl, meaning “free man.” It carries strong royal associations: Charlotte has been borne by queens of England and, more recently, by Princess Charlotte of Wales, born in 2015. Charlotte’s steady upward trajectory since 2015 tracks closely with that royal birth.
Liam’s Irish Conquest of the American Charts
Liam is a shortened form of Uilliam, the Irish Gaelic adaptation of William, a Norman name brought to the British Isles after 1066 and derived from the Old Germanic elements willa (will or desire) and helma (helmet), meaning “resolute protection.” Until the end of the 18th century, Liam was virtually unknown outside Ireland. The Great Famine of the 1840s sent more than a million and a half Irish emigrants to North America, carrying Irish names with them, but Liam as a standalone name in England and Wales wasn’t recorded until 1932, and even then only within families of Irish descent.
The name Liam first entered the top 1,000 most popular names for boys in the US in 1967, when it was the 939th most popular boys’ name. It didn’t crack the top 20 until 2011, entered the top ten in 2012, and has held the number one position every year since 2017. The number of births with the name Liam in 2024 was 22,164, which represents 1.201% of total male births. That figure makes it the most given name in the country while still accounting for just over one percent of all male births, a reflection of how diffuse American naming has become.
The 2025 top ten for boys: Liam, Noah, Oliver, Theodore, Henry, James, Elijah, Mateo, William, and Lucas. The top four names remained unchanged from last year: Liam, Noah, Oliver and Theodore all held onto their positions. Theodore is a Greek name meaning “gift of God,” steadily climbing since the mid-2010s. Henry, from the Old German Heimrich meaning “ruler of the home,” has never fully left the American top twenty since the early twentieth century, and its current position reflects a broader preference for short, strong classical names that have characterized the decade.
The Newcomer: Eliana’s Debut in the Top Ten
The most significant shift on the girls’ side was Eliana’s entry at number ten, replacing Ava, which fell off the list after years among the most popular choices.
Eliana carries one of the richest etymological backstories of any name currently in the top ten. Its primary derivation is Hebrew: a compound of El (God) and ana (answered), meaning “my God has answered.” It is composed of three Hebrew elements: EL, meaning GOD; ANA, meaning HE HAS ANSWERED; and the Yud, located after EL, indicating first person possession. It also carries Latin roots through the Roman family name Aelius, connected to the Greek helios, meaning sun, giving the name a secondary meaning of “daughter of the sun.” The name functions across Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese cultures, where it has been used for generations, which helps explain its particular strength in states with large Latin American populations.
Eliana entered the top 100 popular baby names list in 2016 when it ranked 93rd. Its debut in the top ten in 2025 is the first time in the SSA’s recorded history it has reached that threshold. For many Jews, the Hebrew translation is meaningful when naming a baby who was difficult to conceive. That specific personal meaning has amplified the name’s spread through word of mouth far beyond any single cultural trend or celebrity association.
Ava, the name it displaced, has been a top ten fixture since 2005. Its origins are debated between Germanic roots meaning “life” or “bird-like,” and a Persian derivation meaning “voice” or “sound.” Its two-decade run in the top ten now comes to an end.
The Fastest-Rising Names: Fire and Clarity
Beyond the top ten, the SSA tracks which names gained the most ground in a single year. These fastest movers often signal where naming is heading more clearly than the static top ten, which changes slowly by design.
The fastest-rising baby names include the boys’ name Kasai, meaning “fire” in Japanese and Swahili, which surged 1,108 spots to enter the top 1,000 for the first time. Kasai entered the rankings at number 639 after being statistically invisible the year before. Its dual-language meaning, spanning East Africa and East Asia, reflects a naming culture increasingly willing to draw from non-European linguistic traditions. The other fastest-rising boys’ names were Akari, Eziah, Jasai, and Neithan, a set with roots across Japanese, Hebrew, and Latin American naming traditions.
For girls, Klarity, “a contemporary spelling of ‘clarity’ evoking brightness and light,” saw the biggest jump. Alternative spellings of English words and virtue names have been a recurring thread in American naming for decades, from Nevaeh (heaven spelled backward) to Destiny to Genesis. Klarity fits this lineage while reflecting an enduring appetite for names that carry legible meaning in plain English, dressed in a spelling that makes them feel more distinctly like proper names. The other fastest-risers for girls were Rynlee, Ailanny, Naylani, and Madisson.
What Seven Years at the Top Actually Means
To find a comparable run of naming dominance, you have to look back much further in the SSA’s data. In the agency’s records dating to 1880, Mary held the top spot for girls for 76 consecutive years, from 1880 to 1961. James and Robert traded the number one boys’ position repeatedly through the mid-twentieth century. The current era is defined by far more diversity in naming overall, which makes Olivia and Liam’s seven-year hold more statistically significant than it might appear at first.
Mary at her peak in the 1950s accounted for nearly ten percent of all girl births in a given year. Olivia in 2025 accounts for roughly one percent. Liam’s approximate 1.2 percent share of male births is similarly modest by historical standards, yet still enough to sit at the top of a list where thousands of distinct names now compete. The pool of names American parents choose from has expanded enormously over the past century, which means the concentration of any single name has contracted accordingly.
The Long View Behind the Annual Snapshot
One year of SSA data answers the question of what’s popular. A century of it answers something more interesting: what has endured, what has vanished, and what has returned. Theodore was a top-ten name in the 1910s and 1920s, largely disappeared for fifty years, and has now returned to the top five. Henry has appeared in the American top twenty in virtually every decade since 1880. Charlotte appeared in the top ten in the early 1900s, fell away for most of the century, and has now returned at number two.
The names parents choose today are not invented. They are drawn from a deep well of linguistic and cultural history that stretches back through Shakespeare, through medieval Ireland, through ancient Rome, through the Hebrew scriptures. Eliana, climbing into the top ten in 2025, carries within it the Hebrew word for God and the Greek word for sun. Liam is what the Irish made of a name the Normans brought to England in 1066. Olivia was given to a countess in a play written four centuries ago.
That history is searchable. At BabyNamesData.com, our 125-year database of name popularity lets you trace exactly how any name on this year’s list has moved through American culture, decade by decade, state by state. Whether you’re deciding on a name or simply curious about the one you already have, the data behind it tells a story far longer than any single year’s rankings can contain.