French Baby Names, With Meanings and Data

What France called its babies in 2025

France has an unusually good source. Insee, the national statistics institute, publishes the fichier des prénoms, a file of every first name given in France since 1900 at national, regional and departmental level. The 2025 edition was published on 16 July 2026. Counts are rounded to the nearest multiple of five.

French names with documented meanings

The counts here are from the Office for National Statistics datasets for England and Wales, covering births registered in 2025 and published on 9 July 2026. The ONS records names without accents, so Élodie and Elodie are counted together.

Girls

Boys

What the two datasets show together

France and Britain are choosing different French names

Of the ten girls' names leading France in 2025, only Rose, Emma and Alice are also common in Britain. Louise, Ambre, Alma, Romy and Adèle are not. Meanwhile the French names British parents actually choose — Margot at 1,230, Elodie at 849, Eloise at 546 — are not in the French top 10 at all. Each country is borrowing the other's names, and each is borrowing the ones the other has stopped using.

Half of them are not Latin

Louis, Eloise, Amelie and Genevieve all come from Germanic roots that passed through Frankish into Old French. French is a Romance language with a Frankish layer sitting on top of its personal names, and a list that treats every French name as Latin will get most of the men's names wrong.

Movement, on two dated points

Comparing the ONS 2024 and 2025 files gives two dated points from one source. Camille rose from 59 girls to 71, Genevieve from 67 to 83, Sylvie from 229 to 270, Colette from 18 to 22, Etienne from 18 boys to 28 and Antoine from 6 to 10. Solene went from fewer than three to 14. Against that, Amelie fell from 465 to 398 and Elodie rose from 802 to 849. One caution applies to every count comparison of this kind: total registrations in the ONS files fell by about 1.8 per cent for girls and 1.5 per cent for boys between the two years, so a small decline in a count is not by itself evidence that a name is going out of favour. Rank is the safer measure.

The gender line runs differently in France

Camille, Dominique and Claude are given to both boys and girls in France, and Jean and Marie are routinely combined into compound names for either sex. In England and Wales, Camille went to 71 girls and to fewer than three boys. If a French relative reads a name as unisex and a British relative does not, that is a real difference in the two naming systems rather than a mistake by either of them.

Choosing a French name

Decide about accents at registration. Élodie, Adèle, Raphaël, Maël and Noémie all carry one. UK registrars will record them, but a great deal of British software will not, so the name will appear both ways on passports, school systems and bank cards for the child's whole life. Choosing the unaccented spelling deliberately is a legitimate option; drifting into it accidentally is not.

Test the final consonant. French drops many of them and English does not. Louis is "loo-ee" in France and often "loo-iss" in Britain; the ONS shows both spellings of that sound, with Louie going to a separate group of boys. Remy, Jules and Etienne all shift noticeably between the two languages. Neither pronunciation is wrong, but you should pick the one your family will use before a hundred people pick one for you.

If a link to France matters, use the Insee file rather than a name list. It shows every year from 1900 onwards for any name, at departmental level, so you can see whether a name reads as current in France or as belonging to a particular decade — something no list of meanings can tell you.