Double-Barrelled Baby Names: 903 of Them in the ONS Data

What a double-barrelled first name is

A double-barrelled first name is a single legal forename containing a hyphen: Ivy-Rose, not Ivy Rose. That distinction matters, because the Office for National Statistics counts first names as they are written on the birth certificate. A hyphen makes two words into one recorded name; a space makes them a first name and a middle name, and the ONS does not publish middle names at all. So the hyphenated lists are the only direct evidence the UK registry gives about how parents pair names.

The numbers are larger than most people expect. In 2025 the girls' list contained 903 distinct hyphenated names given to 7,732 babies, and the boys' list contained 381 hyphenated names given to 2,278 babies. That is roughly three per cent of girls in the published list and under one per cent of boys.

The most used hyphenated names, England and Wales, 2025

What the list shows

The second element is doing all the work

The girls' list is dominated by two second elements. Rose accounts for the first, second, third, seventh and ninth most common hyphenated names, and Mae for the fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth. Rae appears just below. On the boys' side, James is the equivalent: it is the second element in five of the ten most common hyphenated boys' names, with Lee and Jay behind it. In effect a small set of connector names is being used the way a middle name is used, but registered as part of the first name.

The elements have real meanings, and two are commonly misreported

Rose reached English through the Norman form of a Germanic name meaning roughly "famous type", from elements meaning "fame" and "kind, sort". Its association with the flower came later, and when the name was revived in the nineteenth century the flower was probably what people had in mind. Mae is a variant of May, which comes from the month, itself named for the Roman goddess Maia, and which also served as a diminutive of Mary, Margaret and Mabel. Neither is a modern invention, and neither means what a name blog usually says it means.

Arabic compound names are a different construction entirely

Abdur-Rahman and Abdul-Hadi appear in the hyphenated list, but they are not double-barrelled names in the sense the rest of the table describes. They are single Arabic compound names of the form abd plus one of the names of God, which have to stay together to make sense, and the hyphen is a transliteration choice rather than a naming style. Grouping them with Ivy-Rose would misread both.

Almost all of the 903 are used by very few babies

Ivy-Rose at 185 babies is by far the largest. The great majority of the 903 hyphenated girls' names were given to fewer than ten babies each, because a hyphen lets parents mint a combination nobody else has used. That is the real function of this part of the data: it is where the UK's name-making happens.

It is overwhelmingly a girls' phenomenon

The gap between 7,732 hyphenated girls and 2,278 hyphenated boys is one of the largest gender asymmetries anywhere in the dataset. Girls receive more than three times as many hyphenated names in a year in which slightly fewer girls than boys were registered. It fits the wider pattern the ONS has reported for years: parents draw on a much larger pool of names for girls, and hyphenation is one more way of enlarging that pool. The boys' hyphenated list is also more repetitive, leaning heavily on James, Lee and Jay, where the girls' list runs to 903 distinct combinations.

Both halves are usually already popular on their own

The elements are not obscure. Ivy was ninth in England and Wales in 2025 with 1,698 babies, Isla fourth with 1,959, and Elsie eighth with 1,700. Parents are not inventing names so much as joining two names that are already at the top of the list. That is worth knowing if the appeal of a hyphenated name is distinctiveness: Ivy-Rose is a rare combination made from two of the most familiar names in the country, and it will read as fashionable rather than unusual.

The practical side of registering a hyphen

A hyphen is part of the legal name, and systems disagree about it. Some forms strip it, some split the name into two fields, some reject the character outright, and airline bookings and passports are the usual places this surfaces. Your child will spend a lifetime explaining whether there is a hyphen. That is not a reason to avoid one, but it is the trade-off, and the alternative — registering Ivy Rose as a first name and a middle name — gives almost the same result with none of the friction.

If you change your mind, the route is the birth registration system rather than a preference. In England and Wales a first name can be altered within twelve months of registration under section 13 of the Births and Deaths Registration Act 1953, and after that it takes a deed poll.