Boys' Names Used for Girls, With 2025 Data

How many names are given to both sexes

This question has a real answer rather than an impression. The Office for National Statistics publishes complete girls' and boys' tables for England and Wales, listing every name given to three or more babies. Cross-referencing the two 2025 files, published on 9 July 2026, gives 735 names that appear in both. That is the size of the shared pool, and most of it sits at very small numbers.

The interesting cases are the names with a clear male history that now go to substantial numbers of girls. Here they are, with both counts for 2025.

What the data actually shows

Names travel one way, and the traffic is heavy

Every name in the table above began as a male name, a surname or both. There is no comparable list running the other way: female names very rarely become male ones, in Britain or anywhere else with published data. Harper is the clearest case in the 2025 file, at 1,367 girls and 7 boys, and it was a surname before it was either.

The crossover has a stable end point

Once a name reaches the high nineties as a percentage of girls, it stops being a boys' name altogether. Harper, Madison, Robyn, Billie and Stevie have all effectively completed that journey; Evelyn, Vivian, Shirley and Beverley completed it generations ago and nobody now reads them as male at all. Evelyn was twelfth among girls in England and Wales in 2025 with 1,560 and did not clear the three-baby threshold among boys.

The middle of the table is the unstable part

Quinn at 52 per cent girls and Remi at 51 per cent are as close to genuinely even as the data gets. Avery at 63 per cent is drifting. Those are the names where the answer to "is this a boy's name or a girl's?" is currently "both", and where a child will spend some of their life being misread on paper.

Movement, on two dated points

Comparing the ONS 2024 and 2025 files gives two dated points from one source. Robin rose on both sides, from 134 girls to 186 and from 437 boys to 485. Quinn went from 174 girls to 175 and from 134 boys to 159, so it is holding its balance. Harper fell from 1,461 girls to 1,367 and from 19 boys to 7, continuing its consolidation as a girls' name. Wren went the other way: down from 377 girls to 362 while rising from 63 boys to 88, the only name here moving noticeably in the male direction. Aubrey rose from 233 girls to 267 and Stevie from 153 to 171.

Where the practice comes from

Most of these names are surnames first. Harper is an occupational surname for a harp player, Madison is "son of Maud", Harley and Marley are place-name surnames, Riley is Irish, Avery and Aubrey come from a Germanic name that became a surname. English has been converting surnames into first names for centuries, and surname-derived names have always been less firmly gendered than names with a saint or a scripture behind them. That is why the traffic runs through them.

The pattern is not unique to England and Wales. National Records of Scotland and the US Social Security Administration both publish complete lists by sex, and the same names appear on both sides in each. Anyone wanting to check a specific name should go to the relevant office's own file rather than a name site, because only the official data gives both counts.

The nickname forms are doing something different

Frankie, Billie, Stevie, Charlie and Georgie are all diminutives rather than full names, and diminutives cross more freely than the names they come from. Charlie went to 1,679 boys and 49 girls; Frankie to 887 boys and 462 girls; Georgie to 77 boys and 142 girls, the only one of the set where the girls' figure is the larger. The -ie ending seems to loosen the gender signal in a way the full form does not.

If you are considering one

Look at both numbers, not the reputation. A name that "sounds unisex" may be 97 per cent one sex in practice, and the child will be read accordingly. The ONS files give you the exact split for any name given to three or more babies.

Expect forms and systems to guess. Schools, airlines, insurers and medical records all infer sex from first names, and a child with a name in the middle of this table will be misfiled regularly. That is an argument for choosing knowingly rather than for avoiding the names.