Names / Data stories

Data stories

Short stories about baby names in England and Wales, worked out from the official ONS records. Each one shows how we did the sums and links to the source.

  • 19 October 2026

    The rise of unusual names

    In 1996, nearly one baby girl in five in England and Wales (19.3%) was given a top-10 name. In 2025 it was about one in fifteen (6.8%). Our calculation from ONS baby names data.

Source for every story: Office for National Statistics, Baby names for girls and Baby names for boys in England and Wales, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Each story shows how we did the sums.

OM

Oliver Mackman

Editor, BabyData

Oliver Mackman is the named editor of BabyData and a director of Best Business Loans Ltd (Companies House 16833937), the company that operates the site. He is accountable for its editorial standards, sourcing and corrections, and requires every number to cite the underlying rule and the official UK dataset behind it, with pregnancy tools written using NHS and gov.uk guidance.

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