The most used girls' names beginning with A in 2025

A is the largest initial in the girls' data by a wide margin. The Office for National Statistics recorded 41,473 girls given a name beginning with A in England and Wales in 2025, spread across 1,235 different spellings, which is about one girl in six. No other letter comes close. The ten below are the most used, with the rank each name holds against all girls' names rather than against other A names.

ONS rank (all girls' names)	Name	Babies in 2025	Meaning and origin
3	Amelia	2,153	Germanic amal, work or labour; often confused with the unrelated Latin Aemilia
11	Ava	1,611	Disputed: a short Germanic name in av-, or a form of Eve; Behind the Name records both
22	Arabella	1,368	Medieval Scottish, probably Latin orabilis, yielding to prayer; a link to Annabel is also argued
34	Aria	1,132	Italian for a solo song, from Latin aer, air; the Hebrew Ariel and Persian Arya are separate names
39	Aurora	1,030	Latin for dawn, and the Roman goddess of the dawn
40	Ada	1,014	Germanic adal, noble; also used as a short form of Adelaide
42	Ayla	980	Turkish for halo or moonlight; a Hebrew name meaning oak is spelled the same way, so the origin is family-specific
52	Alice	825	Norman French Aalis, from Germanic Adalheidis, noble kind
86	Anaya	535	Two unrelated sources: Arabic inaya, care, and a Sanskrit name; the meaning depends on the family
90	Athena	519	The Greek goddess of wisdom and war; the name is pre-Greek and has no agreed further etymology
95	Alba	472	Latin and Spanish alba, dawn or white; also the Gaelic name for Scotland
103	Amara	449	Several unrelated sources: Igbo amara, grace, and an Italian and Greek reading of bitter or unfading

The most used boys' names beginning with A in 2025

For boys the letter is just as dominant: 36,320 babies across 943 different names, again roughly one boy in seven. The list is unusually concentrated at the front, because Arthur, Archie and Arlo together account for more than 7,700 registrations. Ranks below are against all boys' names in England and Wales.

ONS rank (all boys' names)	Name	Babies in 2025	Meaning and origin
5	Arthur	3,211	Disputed: Celtic artos, bear, or the Roman family name Artorius; neither reading is settled
11	Archie	2,465	Short form of Archibald, Germanic ercan genuine and bald bold
15	Arlo	2,083	A literary coinage from Spenser's Arlo Hill, itself an English reshaping of an Irish place name
16	Alfie	1,955	Short form of Alfred, Old English Aelfraed, elf counsel
21	Albie	1,702	Short form of Albert, Germanic adal noble and beraht bright
26	Adam	1,431	Hebrew adam, man, linked in Genesis to adamah, ground
40	Alexander	1,271	Greek alexein to defend and aner man, defender of men
57	Albert	884	Germanic adal noble and beraht bright
76	Alfred	682	Old English Aelfraed, elf counsel
86	Austin	612	Medieval English contraction of Augustine, from Latin augustus, venerable
103	Ali	502	Arabic ali, high or exalted; the fourth caliph and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad
118	Ayaan	443	Two readings are current: Arabic ayan, time or era, and a Somali name; neither is settled

Which A names are rising and which are falling

Climbing

Among the eleven A names inside the girls' top 100, Anaya and Alba both climbed 24 places and entered the top 100 for the first time, the two largest published moves for the letter. Arabella rose 8, Athena 6 and Ayla 5. On the boys' side Adam gained 9 places and Alfred 5. The ten-year columns are more dramatic still: Athena is up 248 places since 2015, Alba 180, Ada 147 and Ayla 101.

Slipping

The falls are small and confined to the established names. Alice slipped 3 places, Ava 2 and Amelia 1; Alexander lost 4, Albie 2, and Arthur and Archie 1 each. Over ten years the pattern is clearer than over one: Alice is down 28 places since 2015 and Alexander 18, while Amelia and Ava have given up only a couple of places each from very high starting positions.

What the published change columns cannot tell you

The ONS publishes change-in-rank columns only for the top 100 names. That covers eleven A names for girls and ten for boys and no more. Amara, Aisha, Autumn, Ali, Ayaan and every other A name below rank 100 has an exact count in the full dataset but no official movement figure, so nothing on this page claims a rise or fall for them.

How big a letter A really is

A owes its size to breadth rather than to one giant name. Amelia is only 5 per cent of all A girls and Arthur 9 per cent of all A boys, the flattest spread of any letter on the girls' side of the list. Compare that with N, where Noah alone is 49 per cent of the letter. If you pick an A name you are joining a very large crowd made of very many different names.

Three clusters do most of the work. The Ar- names carry the boys' list, with Arthur, Archie and Arlo in the top fifteen and Archer and Arham further down. The Al- names run alongside them, from Alfie and Albie to Albert and Alfred. On the girls' side a large group of Arabic and South Asian names, including Anaya, Aisha, Amira, Ayah and Ayat, sits between ranks 86 and 158 and is the reason A has 1,235 distinct spellings.

Further A names in the published 2025 list

The ONS full list does not stop at the tables above, and the counts stay exact all the way down. For girls the next names in order of use are Aisha at 436, Autumn at 434, Annie at 425, Ayra at 422, Amaya at 398, Amelie at 398, Amira at 396, Aurelia at 390, Aaliyah at 368, Anna at 347, Ayah at 338, Annabelle at 337. For boys they are Axel at 363, Asher at 360, Atlas at 355, Archer at 354, Abdullah at 327, Ahmed at 300, Aiden at 298, Abdul at 292, Aaron at 287, Abel at 261, Ayan at 255, Alex at 243. Each figure is the exact number of babies registered with that exact spelling during 2025, taken from the ONS full-list table rather than from the top 100. The letter carries 1,235 different girls' names and 943 different boys' names in the published data altogether, and any name given to two or fewer babies has been removed from it.

Choosing a A name: what the data changes

Two practical points follow from how the ONS counts. First, spellings are counted separately, so Amelia and Amelie appear as different names, and the combined use of a sound is always higher than any single row suggests. Second, a name with a low rank number is not rare: Athena at 90 was still given to 519 babies. If distinctiveness matters to you, look below rank 150, where A has more choice than any other letter.

Baby names starting with A: girls and boys