The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends
The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends
The Office for National Statistics has released its annual list of the most popular boys and girls names in England and Wales – and Oliver and Olivia continue to reign supreme.
Olivia has topped the list of the most popular baby names for girls for the third year in a row, while Oliver has been the most popular baby name for boys for the past six years in a row with 5,390 baby boys given the moniker in 2018.
Amelia, Ava, Isla and Emily completed the top five baby names for girls while George, Harry, Noah and Jack rounded up the top five baby names for boys.
Archie, the moniker of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s son born in May , moved up two places from 2017 to be listed as the sixteenth most popular boy’s name in 2018 – with 2,950 baby boys called Archie in 2018.
Arthur was the only major change in the top ten boy’s names this year, as it moved into seventh, pushing Jacob to eleventh. Poppy and Lily were replaced by Sophia and Grace in the girls’s top ten list at eighth and tenth place respectively.
While there were less babies called Olivia and Oliver than in previous years, this coincided with further ONS date stating that 2018 had the lowest birth rate in England and Wales for 80 years. There were just 657,076 live births in 2018, decreasing 3.2 per cent since 2017 and 9.9 per cent since 2012.
New entries to the ONS top 100 baby boy’s names were Grayson, Jasper, Rowan, Tobias, Sonny and Dominic while Ada, Delilah, Ayla, Zoe, Margot and Felicity were the new entrants to the top 100 baby girl’s names for 2018.
Nick Stripe, from the ONS, said: “Oliver and Olivia remained the most popular baby names in 2018, although there are the first signs that Oliver’s six-year reign as the number one name for boys is under threat.
“Arthur surged into the top 10 boys’ names for the first time since the 1920s, and Ada jumped into the girls’ top 100 for the first time in a century too, both perhaps inspired by characters in the BBC TV drama Peaky Blinders.
“On the flip side, the growth in the use of technology assistants in our homes may help to explain why the number of baby girls named Alexa has more than halved compared with 2017. Communicating with young children can be hard enough at the best of times.”