Saints' names and how they rank in 2025

For most of the last thousand years, choosing an English child's name meant choosing a saint. The practice has faded but the names have not: a large share of ordinary British first names still belong to someone in a church calendar. 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.

Boys

Name	The saint	Babies in 2025
Sebastian	A Roman martyr of the third or fourth century	1,077
Tobias	Through the book of Tobit; a name of the wider tradition	461
Patrick	Fifth-century missionary, patron of Ireland	375
Vincent	Vincent of Saragossa, and Vincent de Paul	560
Aidan	Aidan of Lindisfarne, seventh century	171
Francis	Francis of Assisi, thirteenth century	262
Dominic	Founder of the Dominican order, thirteenth century	246
Christopher	An early martyr; the patron of travellers	247
Anthony	Anthony of Egypt and Anthony of Padua	206
Xavier	Francis Xavier, sixteenth-century missionary	174
Maximilian	Maximilian Kolbe, canonised 1982	245
Benedict	Benedict of Nursia, founder of Western monasticism	50
Oswald	Seventh-century king of Northumbria	27
Ignatius	Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits	7

Girls

Name	The saint	Babies in 2025
Lucy	Lucy of Syracuse, fourth-century martyr	346
Cecilia	Patron of musicians; an early Roman martyr	282
Winifred	Seventh-century Welsh saint	118
Margaret	Margaret of Antioch, and Margaret of Scotland	98
Genevieve	Fifth-century patron of Paris	83
Agnes	A Roman martyr of the early fourth century	79
Catherine	Catherine of Alexandria, and Catherine of Siena	66
Rita	Rita of Cascia, fifteenth century	51
Bridget	Brigid of Kildare, patron of Ireland with Patrick	42
Monica	Fourth-century mother of Augustine of Hippo	26
Teresa	Teresa of Ávila, and Teresa of Calcutta	23
Bernadette	Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes, nineteenth century	17
Joan	Joan of Arc, canonised 1920	14
Clare	Clare of Assisi, thirteenth century	3

Which calendar you mean matters

There is no single list of saints. The Catholic Church canonises through the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints and publishes its own index; the Church of England keeps a calendar of holy days in Common Worship that includes many pre-Reformation saints alongside later figures it commemorates rather than venerates; the Orthodox churches have their own calendars again, with substantial overlap and real differences. A name can be a saint's name in one tradition and not in another.

Timing matters too. Maximilian Kolbe was canonised in 1982 and Teresa of Calcutta in 2016, so those are saints' names of very recent standing. Christopher, by contrast, was removed from the universal Roman calendar of obligatory feasts in 1969 because his historical existence is poorly attested, though he remains a saint. Any confident claim about who is and is not a saint should say which church and which century it is talking about.

What the figures show

Vincent had the sharpest rise on this page

Comparing the ONS 2024 and 2025 files gives two dated points from one source. Vincent went from 453 boys to 560, a gain of more than a fifth, and Cecilia from 224 girls to 282. Winifred rose from 112 to 118 and Bridget from 35 to 42. Going the other way, Dominic fell from 311 boys to 246, Lucy from 392 girls to 346, Ignatius from 11 to 7 and Clare from 5 to 3. Total registrations in these files fell by roughly 1.5 per cent for boys and 1.8 per cent for girls across the same two years, so only the larger moves here are name-specific.

The Irish and Northumbrian saints are holding up

Patrick at 375, Aidan at 171 and Bridget at 42 are all steady or slightly up. Oswald, at 27, is flat. These are names attached to specific places in Britain and Ireland rather than to the continental church, and they behave more like heritage names than like devotional ones.

Sebastian is the outlier

At 1,077 boys, Sebastian is used more than every other name in the boys' table above except by a wide margin, and almost none of that use is devotional. It arrived in English as a saint's name, was carried by a Roman martyr whose story is grim, and now functions purely as an elegant three-syllable name. That trajectory — from martyr to fashion — is what has happened to most of the names on this page over a longer timescale.

Choosing a saint's name

If the saint is the point, check the story before the name. Several of the best-loved names here belong to martyrs whose lives are grim reading, and a child will eventually look it up. Others belong to figures whose historical existence is uncertain, which may or may not matter to you.

If the saint is not the point, you are on very safe ground: Lucy, Sebastian, Catherine, Francis and Christopher have been ordinary English names for centuries and carry no religious charge in British use at all. Nobody meeting a Lucy assumes anything about her parents' beliefs.

Finally, if a name day matters in your family's tradition, look up the date in the calendar your family actually uses rather than a general list. Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox calendars assign different days to the same saint, and in several countries the name day is celebrated more than the birthday.

One caution about sources. Commercial name sites routinely attach a saint to any name that resembles one, and the attributions are often wrong or invented. The Holy See publishes its own index of saints and blesseds, the Vatican dicastery that governs canonisation explains the process, and the Church of England publishes its calendar of holy days. Between those three you can check any claim on this page in a couple of minutes, and that is a better habit than trusting a list.

Saints' Names for Babies, With 2025 Data