Scottish Baby Names, With Pronunciation

Forty-one Scottish names, with a plain-English way to say each one

Scottish names come from three places at once: Gaelic, Scots, and the Norse and Norman layers that arrived on top of both. The Gaelic ones follow rules close to Irish — bh and mh are usually a v, ch is the sound in loch, and dh and gh are usually silent — but the Scots and Norse names, Blair, Fraser, Magnus and Torin among them, say themselves.

The rank columns compare National Records of Scotland's 2025 file with the Office for National Statistics 2025 file for England and Wales. It is the same island and, for many of these names, an entirely different level of familiarity.

What the data actually shows

Some of these names barely exist south of the border

Eilidh is 28th in Scotland and 1,454th in England and Wales. Mirren is 99th and 3,035th. Murray is 88th and 2,014th. Innes is 104th and 2,952nd. Struan is 111th in Scotland and was given to two or fewer boys in England and Wales, which means the ONS suppressed it entirely. Others travel easily: Isla, Freya, Maisie, Bonnie, Logan and Archie are top-50 names in both countries.

Spelling splits are severe in Gaelic names

Ruaridh ranks 52nd in Scotland with 80 babies and Ruairidh 73rd with 67. Added together they would sit around 24th. Eilidh at 28th and its respelling Aila at 157th are the same sound. Finlay is the Scottish spelling and Finley the English one, and the ONS ranks Finley 20th in England and Wales while NRS ranks Finlay 9th in Scotland. Every registry here counts spellings separately, so Gaelic names always look rarer than they sound.

Place names carry more of the list than people expect

Isla, Skye, Iona, Ailsa, Harris, Lewis, Arran, Blair, Murray, Innes and Struan are all geography. That is a much higher proportion than in the English or Irish lists, and it is why so many Scottish names have straightforward, concrete meanings: a stream, a hollow, a field, an island.

How to use this list

Pick your spelling once and defend it. Ruaridh, Ruairidh, Ruairi and Rory are four ways to write one name, and the further from Rory you go, the more often it will be misspelled outside Scotland — but the closer you stay to Rory, the less of the Gaelic remains. There is no neutral option, only a decision.

Do not assume the anglicisation shares a root. Sorcha is often rendered as Sarah, and Mhairi as Mary or Vari, but these are conventions of convenience rather than etymology. Sorcha means brightness and Sarah is Hebrew for princess; they have nothing to do with each other.

Finally, listen to a Gaelic speaker rather than guessing. LearnGaelic's dictionary carries recorded audio, and several of these names — Eilidh, Sorcha, Aonghas, Fionnlagh — are easier to hear once than to read three times.