baby
File photo : A baby

Whether you’re keen to follow the trends with baby names, or if you’re desperate to know what everyone else is calling their newborns so your child won’t be one of five in a class with the same name, it’s interesting to take a look at what’s shaping up to be the most popular baby names for boys and girls in the UK this year, in 2020.

Luckily, baby naming site Nameberry has already crunched the data for us, working out which names in their database have seen the biggest increases in interest over the first half of the year.

Unsurprisingly, a big trend that’s certainly continuing in 2020 for baby names is old fashioned names that went virtually unused as we were growing up.

Probably in a bid to make their child more unique, new parents are becoming increasingly drawn towards vintage names dug out from the archives.

In among those are some names that are entirely new to the top spots, plenty that are two-syllables (which seems to be a particular trend at the moment), and others that feature vowels prominently, either at the beginning or the end.

Check out the top 10 names that are the most popular so far for baby boys and baby girls born in 2020:

Boys’ names for 2020:

  1. Milo
  2. Asher
  3. Oliver
  4. Silas
  5. Levi
  6. Theodore
  7. Jasper
  8. Atticus
  9. Arlo
  10. Leo

Girls’ names for 2020:

  1. Luna
  2. Olivia
  3. Aurora
  4. Maeve
  5. Isla
  6. Charlotte
  7. Ava
  8. Evelyn
  9. Ophelia
  10. Eloise

You can read the full list of names shaping up to be 2020’s most popular over on Nameberry, but if you’re curious about which names were topping the baby name list for boys and girls in 2019, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has just released the baby name data for last year in England and Wales.

As you might well have guessed, the usual favourites were still lurking at the top (Olivia and Oliver, I’m looking at you), but some new trends also emerged. Like the new obsession with naming babies after characters from Peaky Blinders, with the likes of Tommy, Ada, and Arthur all seeing a surge in popularity.