Baby names starting with U: girls and boys

The most used girls' names beginning with U in 2025

U is the third-smallest letter for girls in England and Wales, behind only X and Q. The ONS recorded 417 girls given a U name in 2025 across 46 spellings, which is about one girl in every six hundred. Una leads with 84 babies, and after that every name in the letter is in double or single figures. The list below is most of the published letter, not a selection from a long one.

The most used boys' names beginning with U in 2025

The boys' letter is larger but still tiny by national standards: 667 babies across 44 names. Umar leads with 214, and Usman follows with 90. Almost the entire letter is Arabic in origin, and much of it is drawn from the names of the early caliphs, which is a much narrower base than any other letter in the alphabet rests on.

Which U names are rising and which are falling

Climbing

No U name of either sex has reached the ONS top 100, so the change-in-rank columns contain nothing at all for this letter. There is no published basis for saying that any U name is rising in England and Wales, and this page does not offer one. What can be said is that Umar at 214 babies is the only U name of either sex above two hundred registrations.

Slipping

The same absence applies to falls. Una, Uma, Uriel and every other U name has an exact 2025 count and no direction. For a letter this small that is the right outcome rather than a gap: with counts in the tens, a change of a dozen babies would swing a rank by hundreds of places, and single-year comparisons would be noise dressed up as trend.

What the published change columns cannot tell you

The ONS confidentiality rule matters here as it does for Q and X. 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. In a letter where the tenth most common girls' name was given to nine babies, that rule removes a meaningful part of the real picture, so treat the published list as a floor.

How big a letter U really is

U ranks twenty-fourth for girls and twenty-fourth for boys by babies named, one of only six letters to sit in the same position on both sides. Its concentration is high: Umar is 32 per cent of the boys' letter and Una 20 per cent of the girls', and in a letter of a few hundred babies that means a handful of names carry almost everything.

The girls' letter has an unusual internal structure. Umaymah, Umaima, Umamah, Umaimah, Umama and Umayma are six separate ONS rows for what is essentially one Arabic name spelled six ways, and between them they cover 94 babies, more than Una's 84. Counted as one name it would clearly lead the letter; counted as the ONS counts it, none of the six reaches rank 1,100.

Further U 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 the next names in order of use are Ula at 7, Umaira at 7, Ugomsinachi at 6, Unaisa at 6, Uriella at 6, Ugne at 5, Ume at 5, Umi at 5, Umm at 5, Unaysah at 5, Urte at 5, Uchechi at 4. For boys they are Uday at 7, Umayer at 7, Umayr at 7, Uzayr at 7, Udayveer at 6, Ugomsinachi at 6, Umut at 6, Uriah at 6, Ubaid at 5, Uchechukwu at 5, Uchenna at 5, Ugochukwu at 5. 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 46 different girls' names and 44 different boys' names in the published data altogether, and any name given to two or fewer babies has been removed from it.

Choosing a U name: what the data changes

U is the letter for parents who want something genuinely rare in England and Wales, with the practical costs that brings: spelling, pronunciation and the constant question of where a name comes from. If you are choosing from the Arabic group, the six spellings above are worth comparing carefully, because the version you register is the one your child will spend a lifetime repeating.