Baby names starting with Y: girls and boys

The most used girls' names beginning with Y in 2025

Y is a small letter for girls and an unusually uniform one. The ONS recorded 1,189 girls given a Y name in 2025 across 78 spellings, and no Y girls' name reaches the top 100. Yusra leads with 270 babies at rank 186, and almost every name behind it is Arabic or Persian in origin, with Yasmin and its variants the largest group.

The most used boys' names beginning with Y in 2025

For boys the letter is nearly three times larger, 3,494 babies across 119 names, and two of them are inside the top 100. Yusuf at 798 and Yahya at 625 are the Arabic forms of Joseph and John the Baptist, and the rest of the leading group, Yunus, Yaseen, Yaqub and Yousef, comes from the same source. Y is the most single-tradition letter in the alphabet.

Which Y names are rising and which are falling

Climbing

Both published Y names climbed. Yahya gained 12 places to 81st and is up 123 places since 2015, and Yusuf gained 3 places and is up 51 over the same period. Y is one of only three letters, with P and V, where every name that has a published figure rose in both the one-year and the ten-year columns.

Slipping

Nothing in the Y lists fell, and it is worth being precise about how little that claim covers: it applies to two names out of 197 across both lists. Yara, Yasmin, Yumna, Yunus, Yaseen and everything else in the letter has an exact 2025 count and no published direction whatsoever.

What the published change columns cannot tell you

Because no Y girls' name is inside the top 100, the ONS publishes no rank change for any of them at all. Yasmin at 137, Yasmine at 72 and Yasmeen at 29 are three separate rows for one Persian name, and the ONS gives counts for each and movement for none. The same applies to the Yousef and Yousuf spellings on the boys' side.

How big a letter Y really is

Y ranks twenty-third for girls and twentieth for boys by babies named. Its distinguishing feature is not size but homogeneity: where most letters carry three or four unrelated naming traditions, Y in England and Wales is overwhelmingly one, and the handful of exceptions such as Yana and Yuvraj are small.

That homogeneity has a practical consequence in the data. Because so many Y names transliterate the same Arabic originals, the spelling variants multiply: Yusuf, Yousef, Yousuf and Yusha are separate rows, as are Yaseen and Yasin. Counted together, the Yusuf family alone would be considerably larger than its 798-baby leading row suggests.

Further Y 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 Yitty at 16, Yashvi at 15, Yoana at 12, Yona at 12, Yostina at 11, Yusrah at 10, Yaa at 8, Yami at 8, Yarah at 8, Yashika at 8, Yazmin at 8, Yousra at 8. For boys they are Yaman at 51, Yusha at 36, Youssef at 35, Younis at 32, Yanis at 31, Yousif at 31, Yousaf at 30, Yosef at 29, Yug at 29, Yusef at 29, Yehuda at 26, Yuvaan at 26. 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 78 different girls' names and 119 different boys' names in the published data altogether, and any name given to two or fewer babies has been removed from it.

Choosing a Y name: what the data changes

Y is a letter where the choice is mostly about transliteration rather than about the name itself. If the name matters more than the spelling, look at how the whole family is counted in the ONS list before deciding, since Yusuf, Yousef and Yousuf are heard identically and recorded differently. Yara at 140 and Yumna at 55 are the clearest uncommon choices on the girls' side.