20 Baby Names at Risk of Going Extinct

Names are always falling in and out of fashion. One hundred years ago, Mary, Dorothy, and Robert were topping the baby-naming charts in the United States—but Robert has since fallen to a lowly 64th, Mary to 127th—and Dorothy doesn’t even make the top 200 anymore.

Spare a thought, then, for the names that are not only falling out of fashion, but likely falling out of use altogether.

Every year, the parenting website BabyCenter compiles a list of the most popular new baby names in the United States and analyzes the data to track how they’re rising or falling in popularity. The data from 2024 suggests that 2025 will be the year of the “nickname-name”—that is, a shortened form of longer name—with the likes of Ellie and Liam now more popular than ever.

At the other end of the scale, though, BabyCenter has isolated all the names that are now being used so infrequently by new parents that they’re at risk of going extinct.

1. Girl Names at Risk of Going Extinct
2. Boy Names at Risk of Going Extinct

Jamie fell a staggering 320 places in the rankings from 2023–2024, taking the biggest popularity hit of all the girls’ names in the study. Faring even worse on the boys’ side, Jamal fell no less than 433 places from one year to the next—the worst performance of all.

Other names experiencing a fall from grace include Liv (down 257 places), Karina (down 243), and Belle (down 242) for the girls, and Esteban (down 283), Emery (down 241), and Matthias (down 179) for the boys.

Just as there are often trends marking out the most popular names, there were a few trends found at the bottom end of the BabyCenter rankings, too. For one, the early 2000s’ fondness for -aden names for boys seems to be coming to an end, with Jaden among this year’s biggest losers (down 162 places), and Raiden seemingly not far behind. Millennial-era favorites such as Kelsey (down 187), Taylor (for a boy, down 199 places), and Katie (down 290) all likewise took a significant tumble this year. And it looks like the beginning of the end for the royal flush of names sparked by the weddings and births of the Windsors in the early 2000s and 2010s, with the likes of Catherine, Edward, Anne, and Philip all among this year’s biggest fallers.

See the top 10 rankings of the most endangered boys’ and girls’ names below. To find out more about the study and its data—and to see Top 20 rankings—head to the BabyCenter blog.

Girl Names at Risk of Going Extinct

Boy Names at Risk of Going Extinct

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