Baby names starting with W: girls and boys

The most used girls' names beginning with W in 2025

W is one of the narrowest letters in the alphabet and one of the most top-heavy. Only 68 different W names were given to girls in England and Wales in 2025, the fourth-smallest set of any letter, and Willow alone accounts for 1,384 of the 3,085 babies, or 45 per cent. Winnie at 416 and Wren at 362 are the only other names above three hundred.

The most used boys' names beginning with W in 2025

The boys' letter is almost identical in size and shape: 3,212 babies across 74 names, with William taking 1,456 of them, again 45 per cent, so the two sides of the letter are almost perfectly matched in shape as well as in size. After William and Wilfred the counts drop below 150 and stay there.

Which W names are rising and which are falling

Climbing

Willow gained a place in 2025 to rank 20th and is up 21 places since 2015. William gained 2 places in the year. Those are the only two published movement figures for the entire letter, one on each side, and both are positive. Nothing else in W is inside the top 100, so nothing else has an official direction.

Slipping

Neither published W name fell in 2025, though William is 17 places lower than it stood in 2015, so the letter's one long-run trend is downward on the boys' side despite the good year. Wilfred, Wren, Winnie and Winifred have no published change at all, and the temptation to read a Victorian revival into their counts is not something the ONS data supports.

What the published change columns cannot tell you

Winifred, Winter, Wynter, Wateen, Willa, Willow-Rose, Wyatt, Walter, Woody, Wesley and Wilbur are all below rank 100 and carry counts only. Willow-Rose at 35 is worth noting for a different reason: it shows that the ONS counts hyphenated double names as separate entries, distinct from both Willow and Rose.

How big a letter W really is

W ranks twenty-second for girls and twenty-first for boys by babies named, and twenty-third for both by distinct names. It is a letter with almost no depth: subtract Willow and William and what remains is about 3,400 babies spread over 140 names, most of them given to fewer than a hundred children each.

The letter's second layer is entirely Victorian and Edwardian. Winnie, Winifred, Wilfred, Walter, Wilbur and Winston were all common in Britain a century ago and all sit between 33 and 475 babies now. Alongside them, Wren and Winter belong to the modern nature-name pattern, and there is very little else: W has no large Arabic or South Asian group as most other letters do.

Further W 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 Winnifred at 20, Wilhelmina at 18, Willow-Grace at 18, Willow-Mae at 18, Waziha at 16, Wendy at 16, Waniya at 15, Wynter-Rose at 14, Winter-Rose at 13, Willow-May at 12, Wilma at 12, Wynnie at 12. For boys they are Wali at 27, Warren at 26, Waleed at 25, Wade at 22, Weston at 22, Woodrow at 22, Wolfe at 17, Wolf at 16, Wilson at 15, Wolfie at 14, Wahaj at 13, Wylder at 13. 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 68 different girls' names and 74 different boys' names in the published data altogether, and any name given to two or fewer babies has been removed from it.

Choosing a W name: what the data changes

W offers an unusually stark choice between the two names everyone knows and a set of names almost nobody uses. If Willow or William appeals, treat it as a top-25 name rather than a distinctive one. If you want the letter without the crowd, Winifred at 118, Walter at 127 and Wilbur at 67 are established names given to fewer than 150 children each in the whole country.