Latin Baby Names, With Meanings and 2025 Data

How Roman names actually worked

A Roman citizen normally had three names: a praenomen or personal name, a nomen marking the clan and a cognomen marking the branch of the family. Only about eighteen praenomina were in general use, so the interesting Roman names in circulation today — Julius, Cassius, Aurelius, Camilla, Cornelia — are mostly clan or family names rather than personal ones. That is worth knowing before you tell people what a name meant to a Roman, because in many cases it meant "of that family" and nothing more.

The counts below are from the Office for National Statistics baby names datasets for England and Wales, covering births registered in 2025 and published on 9 July 2026.

Girls

Boys

What the 2025 figures show

The vocabulary names are winning

Names that are simply Latin words doing their job are the ones with real numbers: Felix at 811, Clara at 610, Aurelia at 390, Lucia at 284, Maximus at 228 and Flora at 193. Names that were Roman family labels rather than descriptions sit far lower: Cornelia at seven, Tiberius at seven, Titus at thirteen, Aurelius at eighteen. English has always taken Latin words more readily than Roman surnames, and 2025 is no exception.

Two of them moved measurably

Set against the ONS 2024 file, Marcella went from 14 to 23, Julius from 20 to 31 and Claudia from 47 to 58, while Octavia fell from 109 to 80, Augustus from 36 to 26 and Antonia from 119 to 91. Those are small absolute numbers, so treat them as movement in a thin part of the distribution rather than as a trend you can rely on.

Clara and Claire are separating

Clara, the Latin form, went to 610 girls in 2025 against 564 in 2024. This is the same pattern visible in Greek names, where the source form gains while the later French form loses. If you like the sound and want the version that will feel current in fifteen years, the data currently points at the Latin one.

Church Latin is a separate stream

A third group of Latin names reached English through the Roman church rather than through Rome itself: Benedict from benedictus, "blessed", Vincent from vincens, "conquering", Clement from clemens, "merciful", and Beatrix. These behave differently from both the vocabulary names and the clan names, because they arrive attached to a saint. Benedict went to 50 boys in 2025 and Vincent to 560, up from 453 in 2024, the largest single-year gain of any name on this page.

Choosing a Latin name

Check what the name meant to Romans before you lean on the meaning. Claudia is a perfectly good name, but the traditional gloss for the family name is "lame", and someone will eventually tell your child so. Cassius may come from a word for "empty". Neither is a reason to rule a name out, and neither meaning was live for the Romans who used it, but you should hear it from a source that shows its working rather than from a playground.

Watch for names that are titles. Augustus was an honorific voted to Octavian by the Senate, and Maximus was a cognomen meaning "greatest". Both are in use as ordinary British names now — Maximus went to 228 boys in 2025 — but they carry more grandeur than most first names, and they shorten sharply, to Gus and Max, which is often what parents are really choosing.

Finally, distinguish Latin from Latinate. Amelia, Olivia and Emilia all look Latin and are not straightforwardly so: Olivia was first recorded in English in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and Amelia comes from a Germanic root reshaped in Latin spelling. If Roman origin is the point, stay with the names above, where a dictionary can show you the word.

One structural point is worth carrying away. Roman women were often known by the feminine form of the clan name, which is why Julia, Livia, Claudia, Cornelia, Antonia and Octavia all exist and why sisters in the same family could share a name distinguished only by "the elder" and "the younger". The modern habit of treating each of these as a distinct name with its own meaning is a later invention, and it is the main reason so many published glosses for Roman women's names are confidently wrong.