Dutch baby names, with the official 2025 counts

The official 2025 lists

Dutch name statistics are published by the Sociale Verzekeringsbank, the social insurance institution, which sees every birth in the Netherlands through child benefit registration. It publishes counts rather than estimates, and withholds any name given fewer than ten times in the year to protect privacy. These are the 2025 figures.

The scale is worth registering. The most popular name in the Netherlands in 2025 was given to 883 babies; the most popular boys' name in England and Wales was given to 5,957. The Netherlands is a smaller country, but the gap is bigger than population alone explains: Dutch naming is unusually spread out, with no single name dominating.

Noor, and a coincidence worth knowing

Noor topped the girls' list. In Dutch it is a short form of Eleonora or Honora. It is also, independently, the Arabic word for light and a common name among Dutch families of Moroccan and Turkish background. Two unrelated names, one spelling, both current in the same country. Neither derivation is more correct than the other; which one applies depends on the family, and a list that gives only one meaning is telling half the story to half its readers.

Dutch short forms, and what they shorten

A large part of the Dutch repertoire consists of short forms that have become names in their own right. They look opaque until you know the original.

Sem, fourth on the 2025 boys' list, is a different case: it is the Dutch form of Shem, the biblical son of Noah, which puts the top of the Dutch boys' chart in an unintentionally coherent order.

The roepnaam

Dutch children are frequently registered under a formal name and called something else entirely. The registered names may be Latinate and traditional — Johannes, Wilhelmina, Cornelis — often chosen to honour grandparents, while the roepnaam, the calling name, is the one used every day and the one the child answers to at school. Historically the formal name was often several names long, one for each grandparent.

The practice of naming after grandparents, vernoemen, was once close to compulsory and followed a defined order: first son after the paternal grandfather, first daughter after the maternal grandmother, and so on down. It has weakened a great deal but has not disappeared, and it explains why so many Dutch families have the same handful of formal names repeating across generations while the everyday names change completely.

What the Dutch list has in common with the British one

Comparing the 2025 lists side by side is instructive. Noah, Liam, Luca, Lucas, Levi, Finn, Emma, Mila, Nora, Sophie and Olivia are all near the top in the Netherlands, and most of them are near the top in Britain and the United States too. The internationally mobile short names have arrived everywhere at once, which is what a shared media culture does to naming.

What is distinctively Dutch is everything else on the list: Sem, Mees, Noud, Guus, Siem, Milou, Yara, Saar and Tess. These have not travelled and probably will not, because their sounds and spellings are tied to Dutch. A Dutch family abroad choosing between the two groups is really choosing how much explaining they want the name to require.

Frisian names

Frisian is a separate language, official in the province of Friesland, and it has its own name pool: Sjoerd, Wytse, Fokke, Tjitske, Jelle, Rixt. Several have crossed into general Dutch use, and Frisian names are among the most distinctive in the Netherlands precisely because they are not Dutch at all. Frisian is the closest living language to English, which is a fact that surprises most English speakers and explains a few of the shapes.

How the SVB figures are compiled

Two features of the dataset are worth understanding before comparing it with anything else. First, the SVB counts names as registered, and it publishes only names given ten or more times in the year, so the tail is invisible: a name given to eight children in 2025 exists but will not appear. That threshold is higher than the ONS's, which publishes down to three, so the Dutch list looks shorter than the British one for reasons of disclosure policy rather than diversity.

Second, these are counts of first names as registered, which in the Netherlands means the formal name rather than the roepnaam. A country where a large minority of children are known by a name other than their registered one produces a statistical picture that is accurate and slightly beside the point — it tells you what is on the paperwork, not what is being called across a playground.

Dutch names in English-speaking countries

The obstacles are predictable. The Dutch ij digraph, the initial sch, and the guttural g have no English equivalents, so Thijs, Sjoerd and Gijs will be mispronounced. Names without those features travel easily: Luca, Finn, Levi, Sara, Emma, Mila and Nora are already at home in English, and several of them are near the top of both the Dutch and the English lists for the same year.