The Rarest Baby Name in Each State

If you’re planning on having a baby in 2025, then there are a lot of boxes to check before your little bundle of joy comes into this world. While getting a nursery set up and making sure you have enough diapers to get you through your first few weeks of parenthood is paramount, having a great name ready to go should be near the top of your list—especially for the birth certificate.

Traditional and vintage-sounding baby names can be fun to pass down to the new generation in your family, but some parents opt to go a different route. They want to find something completely new and original, so their children stand out in a room full of Jacobs and Emilys.

But sometimes, tracking down those unique, one-of-a-kind names can get tricky. So to help, Go Au Pair, an au pair and childcare agency, ranked the rarest baby names in the United States (including the District of Columbia).

To do so, they examined birth data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) between the years 2000 and 2023. Because the public SSA database excludes names used less than five times within a given geographic area to protect privacy, all the monikers cited in Go Au Pair’s rankings were used in at least five instances between 2000 to 2023.

In addition to looking at the name itself, the agency compared the number of infants born in a particular state to how many across all 50 states had that same exact name. With each name, they also examined each state’s share of the national total of infants with it.

What’s the Rarest Baby Name in Your State?

Go Au Pair's findings show that the U.S. certainly has its fair share of exceptional names, and they really run the gamut in terms of meanings and spellings. One of the quirkiest names is Naim, with Delaware claiming the most babies with this name. The name Naim has an Arabic origin and means “peace.” Meanwhile, Ohio’s most unusual name is Firman, with nearly 42 percent of children who have that name in the U.S. residing in the Buckeye State. The name comes from the Persian word for “order” or “decree.”

In Alaska, the largest state in America, the most distinctive appellation is Atigun. But down in California, the state with the most people, that honor goes to Alique. Interestingly, Noname claims the top spot in Arizona. It’s unclear if it sounds like “no name” or if it’s intentionally pronounced as “no-NAH-may.” Either way, it’s a moniker that stands out.

Here are the rarest baby names across each part of the U.S.:

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