2025 Rare Girl Names Report

2025 girl name rarity at a glance

The national file represents 1,607,267 published female-name records in 2025. Because the Social Security Administration does not publish names with fewer than five occurrences for a sex in a year, every number below describes the public file rather than every birth that may have occurred.

Our 2025 rarity scale

This scale gives the site a consistent way to separate familiar names from genuinely scarce spellings. It is a practical editorial framework based on the 2025 U.S. file, not an official SSA classification.

Our Very Rare Girl Names guide uses “under 100 births” as an umbrella, so it includes both the 25–99 group and the exceptionally rare 5–24 group.

Rare girl names under 50 births in 2025

There were 14,087 published female spellings with 5–49 births in 2025. That is 81.4% of all published spellings, but only 11.8% of published female-name records. In other words, most spellings live in the long tail even though most babies receive much more familiar names.

Browse our curated very rare girl names →

Rare names with the biggest 2025 gains

To reduce noise from tiny counts, this table looks only at names that were outside the 2025 Top 1,000 and had at least 50 published births in both 2024 and 2025. It then ranks them by the largest increase in actual birth count, not by rank movement alone.

See more rising rare girl names →

Rare names with the biggest 2025 declines

The same filter shows the largest year-over-year birth-count declines among names still outside the Top 1,000 in 2025. A one-year drop does not prove a long-term trend, but it is useful context for names that may feel less common than they did recently.

See more falling rare girl names →

Rare names reaching a new published high

These names were outside the Top 1,000 in 2025, had at least 100 births, and reached their strongest published annual count in the 1880–2025 archive. They are still uncommon nationally, but 2025 was a record year for the exact spelling.

Older rare names making a comeback

Some uncommon names are not new at all. The names below were published before 1950, remain outside the 2025 Top 1,000, and show a clear rise compared with 2015. This is one reason historical data matters: a rare name can be rediscovered rather than invented.

Names that sound rare but are not especially rare

Style can be misleading. A name may sound celestial, botanical, ancient or futuristic while still being used hundreds or thousands of times a year. We keep these names useful for inspiration, but we do not present them as statistically rare.

What this report can and cannot tell us

The report measures published U.S. use of exact spellings. It does not measure whether a name is culturally rare, rare in another country, rare within a language community or emotionally unique to a family. It also cannot distinguish zero births from one to four births because the national public files suppress counts below five.

Ranks can move sharply near the bottom of the list, so we prefer actual birth counts when describing meaningful change. We also keep subjective style labels separate from measurable popularity. For the full rules, see How We Measure Rare Girl Names and How We Research Girl Names.