Indian Baby Names, With Meanings and Data

There is no official Indian name ranking, and we are not going to invent one

Britain, France, Spain, Poland and the Nordic countries all publish baby-name statistics through a national body. India does not. Birth registration is handled at state level under the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, and no central authority compiles or publishes first-name frequencies. Any "most popular Indian baby names" list you find is either a commercial site's own traffic data or an invention.

What can be cited is the Office for National Statistics data for England and Wales, which counts every birth registered and is published in full. Britain has one of the largest Indian diaspora populations in the world, so those figures are genuinely informative — they just describe Indian names in Britain rather than in India, and we say so rather than blurring the two.

India also has many languages. Names below are largely Sanskrit in origin, which is the common source across Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada and Telugu naming, but Tamil, Punjabi and Urdu naming traditions each have their own stock, and a single "Indian names" list flattens real differences.

Girls

Boys

What the 2025 figures show

Modern coinages are outgrowing the classical names

Anaya at 535 girls is the most used name on this page, ahead of every Sanskrit classic on it, and it rose from 431 in 2024. Aarav rose from 135 boys to 179 and Reyansh from 27 to 39, while Arjun went from 118 to 136 and Ravi from 25 to 38. The names doing best in Britain are recent Indian coinages that read easily in English, not the names with the longest textual history.

Several are shorter than the tradition they come from

Dev, Veer, Tara, Diya, Riya and Priya are all one or two syllables, which is unusual in classical Sanskrit naming and very convenient in a British classroom. That is a real pattern in the data rather than a coincidence.

Meanings need more care here than almost anywhere

Sanskrit is well documented and the classical names have solid derivations that a proper dictionary will confirm: arya "noble", vira "hero", deva "god", tara "star". The modern coinages — Saanvi, Aanya, Kiaan, Reyansh — often do not, and the confident meanings attached to them on commercial sites are frequently reverse-engineered. We have marked those as contested rather than repeating a gloss we cannot source.

Some of these names belong to more than one tradition

Amara is Sanskrit for "immortal", an Igbo name meaning "grace", and a Latin-derived name in Italian and Spanish use. Tara is Sanskrit for "star" and an Irish place name. Maya is Sanskrit and also Hebrew and Greek. Rohan is Sanskrit and also an Irish surname. None of these overlaps is a problem, but a page that assigns each name a single origin is choosing one and hiding the rest.

Britain's Indian names are not India's

Because no Indian ranking exists to compare against, it is worth being clear about what the ONS figures do and do not tell you. They show which Indian-origin names British parents registered, in a population shaped by particular waves of migration from particular regions. A family in Chennai, Kolkata or Amritsar would produce a very different shortlist, drawing on Tamil, Bengali and Punjabi stock that barely appears in the tables above. Treat this as a list of Indian names in Britain.

Choosing an Indian name

Check the vowel length. Sanskrit distinguishes long and short vowels, and English does not. Written as Aarav, Saanvi and Vihaan, the doubled letters are marking length rather than a British spelling quirk, and dropping them changes the word. Decide which spelling goes on the certificate and stay with it.

Think about the family naming pattern before the name. Many Indian families use a patronymic, a village or house name, or a caste or community name in the surname position, and several communities have their own rules about which syllable a child's name should start with, sometimes decided from the birth chart. If any of that applies in your family, it will constrain the shortlist far more than a meaning will.

Finally, test the name against English spelling. Anaya, Diya, Riya, Tara and Dev survive intact. Reyansh, Vihaan and Saanvi will be misspelled routinely. Neither outcome is wrong, but it is worth choosing knowingly.