Baby names starting with Z: girls and boys

The most used girls' names beginning with Z in 2025

Z is far larger than its position at the end of the alphabet suggests. The ONS counted 4,630 girls given a Z name in 2025 across 199 spellings, which puts it ahead of J, G, K and T for babies named. Zara leads with 625, and the letter is unusually flat behind it: Zoe at 445, Zahra at 418 and Zainab at 385 follow closely.

The most used boys' names beginning with Z in 2025

The boys' letter is larger still, 6,307 babies across 196 names, ahead of I, G and Y. Zachary leads with 703, but the names behind it come from a different tradition entirely: Zakariya at 421, Zayn at 376, Zayd at 285, Zain at 240 and Zayan at 240 are all Arabic, and together they far outweigh the letter's English entry.

Which Z names are rising and which are falling

Climbing

Only one Z name of each sex is inside the top 100, so the published record is two figures. Zara fell 4 places and is one place below its 2015 position. Zachary fell 6 places and is down 34 since 2015. Neither rose, which means the letter has no published climber at all, whatever its growing count of distinct names might suggest.

Slipping

Zachary's ten-year fall of 34 places is the larger of the two and the only substantial published decline in the letter. Zara's movement is negligible in both columns. Nothing else in Z carries an official change figure, so claims about Zayn, Zion or Zoya rising or falling are not supported by the 2025 tables and none is made here.

What the published change columns cannot tell you

Zoe, Zahra, Zainab, Zoya, Zaynab, Zoey, Zimal, Zayna, Zofia, Zakariya, Zayn, Zion, Zayd, Zain and Zayan are all below rank 100 and have counts without direction. Zainab and Zaynab are separate rows at 385 and 149, and Zain, Zayn, Zayan and Zayaan are four more for closely related names, so the letter's real concentration is higher than any single row shows.

How big a letter Z really is

Z ranks sixteenth for girls and seventeenth for boys by babies named, and sixteenth for both by distinct names, which makes it the most consistent mid-table letter in the alphabet. Its concentration is low: Zara takes 13 per cent of the girls' letter and Zachary 11 per cent of the boys', so the letter has a genuine middle rather than one dominant name.

Almost all of that middle is Arabic, Persian or South Asian. On the girls' side Zahra, Zainab, Zoya, Zaynab, Zimal, Zunaira, Zayna, Zaina and Zaira together far outnumber Zara and Zoe; on the boys' side the Zayn and Zayd families do the same to Zachary. Z is one of the few letters where the English names are the minority rather than the default.

Further Z 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 Zaina at 51, Zaira at 49, Zoha at 49, Zuzanna at 46, Zarah at 42, Zyra at 41, Zunaisha at 40, Zadie at 38, Zaynah at 38, Zelda at 38, Zunairah at 37, Zariah at 36. For boys they are Ziggy at 112, Zaid at 110, Zack at 108, Zohan at 100, Zach at 94, Zidane at 90, Zac at 87, Zakaria at 74, Zakariyya at 73, Zayden at 67, Zak at 62, Zavian at 62. 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 199 different girls' names and 196 different boys' names in the published data altogether, and any name given to two or fewer babies has been removed from it.

Choosing a Z name: what the data changes

Z is the letter to look at if you want a name that is uncommon in the national list but entirely familiar within a community, since almost every name in it sits below rank 100 while several are given to hundreds of babies a year. If you are choosing within the Zayn or Zainab families, compare the spellings in the ONS list first, because four or five variants of each are in active use.