Ranking the Most Gender-Neutral Baby Names in the Us

Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago

aaronjbecker

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nameplay.orgOtherstory

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Gender NeutralityNaming ConventionsSocial Trends

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Gender Neutrality

Naming Conventions

Social Trends

The article ranks the most gender-neutral baby names in the US, sparking discussion on naming conventions and their cultural implications.

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Oct 20, 2025 at 3:47 PM EDT
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Discussion (7 comments)

Showing 7 comments

evanjrowley

2 months ago

1 reply

I suppose Ashley was not included here because it's a US-specific data set, but among English-speaking countries, I suspect it must be one of the top gender-neutral names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_(given_name)

aaronjbeckerAuthor

2 months ago

the data is not only US specific but also focuses on recent naming trends, with the first chart covering 2000-2024. In the US, Ashley has been overwhelmingly female since the late 1960s: https://nameplay.org/names/combined/popularity/Ashley#gender...

defrost

2 months ago

1 reply

As both Ryley and Reilly are present, with Rian but no Ryan ...

Did you consider delving into the swampy waters of homophone names (and the tangential cesspool of alternative spelling and pronounciations) ?

Fortuneately the pool of babies named including unicode emoji's is still low in number.

aaronjbeckerAuthor

2 months ago

I have been working on an algorithm to combine names with pronunciations that overlap, based on ARPAbet phoneme representations from CMU dict + generated by LLMs. The data is still messy, because "creative" spellings are hard for LLMs to deal with: token overlap with primary names is frequently low, and spelling variations only exist because English has such a lax approach to phonics to begin with.

Here's Ryan with its spelling variations: https://nameplay.org/names/combined/popularity/Ryan

al_borland

2 months ago

1 reply

The rankings on these lists do not square well with my life experience up to this point. The ones I thought would be at the top were non-existent or deep into the article in a specific table. The ones near the top of all the lists, I’ve never seen used in real life.

aaronjbeckerAuthor

2 months ago

1 reply

I have a follow-up post that covers "common" unisex names, which I arbitrarily defined as names with at least 25k births for both sexes. This one does have more of the names you were probably expecting to see: https://nameplay.org/blog/common-unisex-names-by-gender-rati...

The ranking for the linked post is based on a diversity index, which scores most highly for names closest to an exact 50-50 split. Hence framing it as the "most non-binary" of the unisex names. Admittedly this is more a statistical curiosity than a reflection of everyday life.

al_borland

2 months ago

Thanks, this makes sense. I was starting to think I was even more of a hermit than I thought.

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