Baby names starting with Q: girls and boys

The most used girls' names beginning with Q in 2025

Q is the smallest letter in the girls' data and one of the few where a complete list is possible. The ONS recorded just seven different Q names for girls in England and Wales in 2025, given to 227 babies in total. Quinn accounts for 175 of them, or 77 per cent of the letter, the highest share any name holds anywhere in the alphabet.

The most used boys' names beginning with Q in 2025

The boys' letter is only slightly larger: 319 babies across 20 names. Quinn again leads, with 159 registrations, and Qasim follows at 34. Below that the counts fall into single figures almost immediately, and everything given to two or fewer babies has been removed from the published data under the ONS confidentiality rules.

Which Q names are rising and which are falling

Climbing

There is no rising or falling to report for Q, and no honest way to invent it. No Q name for either sex has ever come close to the top 100 in the current series, so the ONS publishes no change-in-rank column for any of them. What can be said is that Quinn is the only Q name in England and Wales given to more than a hundred babies of either sex.

Slipping

The same applies in the other direction. Without published change columns there is no basis for saying that Queenie, Quentin or Quincy is fading, however plausible that might sound. The counts on this page are exact; the trends are simply not published, and the tables below are the whole of what the ONS reports about the letter.

What the published change columns cannot tell you

Q is also the letter where the ONS redaction rule matters most. Names given to two or fewer babies in England and Wales are removed from the published dataset under section 40 of the Freedom of Information Act, to protect confidentiality. For a letter this small that removes a real proportion of the actual names in use, so the seven girls' names below are the published list, not the complete one.

How big a letter Q really is

By babies named, Q ranks twenty-fifth for girls and twenty-sixth for boys, second only to X in scarcity. To put 227 girls in perspective, that is fewer than the 228 girls given the single name Niamh, and about one girl in every 1,100 born in England and Wales in 2025.

The letter divides into three small groups. Quinn and Quincy are Irish and Norman surnames used as given names. Qasim, Qamar, Qais and Qazi are Arabic. Queenie and Queen are English word names of the kind that were common in the late Victorian period and have never fully disappeared. There is no fourth tradition, which is why the letter stays so small.

Further Q names in the published 2025 list

The ONS full list does not stop at the tables above, and the counts stay exact all the way down. For girls there is nothing further to list, because the ONS published only 7 different Q names for girls in the whole of England and Wales in 2025 and every one of them is in the table above. For boys they are Quhey at 4, Quin at 4, Quinlan at 4, Quinten at 4, Qusay at 4, Qayyim at 3, Quan at 3, Quincey at 3. Each figure is the exact number of babies registered with that exact spelling during 2025, taken from the ONS full-list table rather than from the top 100. The letter carries 7 different girls' names and 20 different boys' names in the published data altogether, and any name given to two or fewer babies has been removed from it.

Choosing a Q name: what the data changes

Q is the letter to choose if you want a name almost nobody else in the country shares, and Quinn is the only choice in it that will not need spelling out constantly. Note that Quinn is used for both sexes in almost equal numbers, 175 girls and 159 boys, which makes it one of the most genuinely balanced names in the entire 2025 dataset.