Welsh Baby Names, With Pronunciation

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

Welsh spelling is phonetic once you know the rules. The letters ll and ch have no English equivalent — ll is made by putting your tongue where you would for an L and blowing air past it, and ch is the sound in loch. Beyond those two, dd is the th of this, f is a v, ff is an f, w is a vowel sounding like oo, and y is either uh or ee depending on where it falls. Stress is almost always on the second-to-last syllable.

The rank column below is the single most useful thing on this page. The Office for National Statistics publishes a separate top 100 for Wales alongside the England and Wales list, with each name's rank in England shown beside it. That comparison is not available for any other minority language in Britain. Where a name falls outside the Welsh top 100, ONS publishes no England-only rank for it, so the second figure below is its rank across England and Wales combined.

What the data actually shows

Wales names its children differently, and the ONS proves it

Olivia and Noah top the Welsh lists as they do the English ones, but underneath that the two countries diverge sharply. Mali is the fourth most popular girls' name in Wales and 1,118th in England. Mabli is 36th in Wales and 2,191st in England. Osian is the tenth most popular boys' name in Wales and 671st in England; Tomos is 56th and 3,134th. Those are not small differences of taste. They are two separate naming cultures inside one statistical release.

Welsh and anglicised spellings are ranked apart

Elis sits 36th in Wales and Ellis 51st, and they are the same name. Jac and Jack, Harri and Harry, Lili and Lily are likewise separate rows in the ONS table. If you add the Welsh and English spellings together, several of these names are considerably more common in Wales than the published ranking suggests.

The oldest names and the newest ones both come from words

Seren, Eira and Ffion are modern names taken straight from Welsh nouns — star, snow and foxglove. Rhiannon, Branwen, Olwen and Taliesin come from medieval literature, chiefly the Mabinogi. Both groups sound distinctively Welsh, but only the second group has any depth of history, and a name like Seren is a twentieth-century arrival in the way that Willow is in English.

How to use this list

If you are naming a child in Wales, the practical question is not whether the name is Welsh but whether it survives contact with English speakers. Seren, Ffion, Elin, Rhys, Cai and Dylan travel easily. Gruffudd, Gwenllian, Angharad, Myfanwy and Iestyn will be misread and misspelled outside Wales for the whole of a life. Both choices are legitimate; make it knowingly.

Watch the two-pronunciation names. Dylan is DUL-an in Welsh and DILL-an in English, and both are now correct in their own contexts. Ellis and Elis sound the same but look different on a form. Cai is KYE, not KAY. Deciding early which version your family uses saves years of low-grade correction.

Finally, take meanings from a dictionary rather than a name list. Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, the standard historical dictionary of Welsh, is the place to check whether a name really does mean what a baby-name page says it means. Several popular glosses — Enid and Gruffudd among them — are disputed, and the honest answer is that we do not know.