Colour-Inspired Baby Names, With 2025 Data

Colour names that no longer sound like colours

The most successful colour names are the ones that stopped being colours a century ago. Violet and Scarlett have been English girls' names for so long that most people hearing them do not think about the shade at all. The counts below are from the Office for National Statistics datasets for England and Wales, covering births registered in 2025 and published on 9 July 2026.

Colour names that still sound like colours

These are the ones people notice. Some are established; several are barely used at all.

What the figures show

The oldest colour names are the biggest, and they are not the loudest

Poppy, Sienna, Violet and Ruby are all in the top 40 in England and Wales. None of them sounds like a colour choice to a British ear, because each has a century or more of use behind it as an ordinary name. Indigo, at 82 girls, and Lilac, at 15, are far more conspicuous precisely because they are rare.

Some of the established ones are slipping

Comparing the ONS 2024 and 2025 files gives two dated points from one source. Amber fell from 399 girls to 302 and Scarlett from 610 to 496, both well beyond the roughly 1.8 per cent fall in total girls' registrations across the same period. Rose fell from 742 to 666 and Poppy from 1,888 to 1,789. Against that, Olive rose from 834 to 892, Iris from 707 to 759 and Violet from 1,010 to 1,061. The names gaining are the botanical ones; the names losing are the ones that read most directly as a colour.

Boys' colour names are mineral rather than floral

The colour names given to boys in Britain are Sage, Onyx, Sterling, Grey, Jet and Blue — stones, metals and plain colour words. The girls' side is dominated by flowers, fruit and gems. That split is very sharp in the data and worth noticing if you are trying to choose a colour name that does not signal a sex.

Several are not colour words in origin at all

Iris is a Greek goddess and a flower; the eye and the colour take their name from her. Hazel is a tree, and the eye colour is a nineteenth-century extension of it. Amber is fossilised resin that reached English from Arabic by way of French, and the colour is named after the substance. If you want a name whose colour sense is the original one, the short list is Violet, Jade, Indigo, Lilac, Grey and Blue.

Choosing a colour name

Say it with the surname before anything else. Colour names sit unusually badly against some surnames — Violet White, Jade Green, Amber Brown — and the joke will be made. Two minutes of saying the full name aloud will tell you more than any list.

Check whether the word is doing anything else. Sage is a herb, a colour and an adjective meaning wise. Iris is a colour word only indirectly; it is a flower, a Greek goddess and part of the eye. Names with several senses age better than names with one, because there is somewhere else for the meaning to go.

Be careful with the word origins you repeat. Scarlett is not really a colour name at all in origin: it comes from a surname for someone who worked with a costly cloth, and the colour is named after the cloth rather than the other way round. Sienna is a pigment named after a city. Saffron, lilac and amber all reached English from Arabic or Persian by way of trade. The etymologies are more interesting than the one-word glosses, and they are easy to check in a dictionary that shows its sources.

Finally, remember what the ONS data cannot tell you. Names given to fewer than three babies are suppressed, so Cerise, Auburn, Cobalt and Slate may be in use in England and Wales without appearing anywhere in the file. Rarity below that line is invisible rather than absent.