Boy names A–Z

A is the largest letter here by a distance, with 136 entries. S comes next at 104, M at 98, K at 86 and T at 82. At the thin end, X holds six names, Q nine, U sixteen, Z eighteen and Y twenty-seven — those five smallest letters together still come to fewer names than A holds on its own.

A's size is not one tradition inflating it. No single origin accounts for more than nine of its 136 names: Yoruba leads at nine, Arabic at eight, Hebrew at seven, then Finnish, Sanskrit, Latin, Italian and Spanish at six apiece. A is broad rather than deep, and the letter where a browser is likeliest to meet something new.

Counting names on a page and counting names on the U.S. charts give two different answers. In the 2025 Social Security top 100, eighteen letters supply at least one name and eight supply none at all. A supplies fourteen, more than any other letter, and yet not one A name reaches the top 25 — Asher at #28 is the best it does. J supplies thirteen, headed by James at #6. L supplies only ten but owns the top of the list outright, with Liam at #1, Lucas at #10, Levi at #12 and Luca at #14.

Five letters — A, J, L, E and M — account for 54 of the top 100 between them. The very top of the chart is more democratic than that: the five most popular boy names in the country begin with five different letters, Noah at #2, Oliver at #3, Theodore at #4 and Henry at #5 following Liam.

K is where the two maps come apart hardest. Eighty-six K names are written up here, the fourth-largest letter on the site, and exactly one of them charts: Kai at #93. Look at what K is made of and the reason is obvious. Twenty of those 86 names are Hawaiian and six are Akan day-names — K is the letter where the site's Pacific and West African traditions concentrate, and neither tradition registers in American national data. Kwame and Keanu are not rare names; they are simply not counted in a table built from U.S. birth certificates.

W is the mirror image. Only 31 W names exist here, one of the smaller letters, yet six of them are in the top 100 — the best strike rate in the alphabet, from William at #9 through Wyatt (#38), Wesley (#52), Weston (#55), Waylon (#56) and Walker (#78). Sixteen of W's 31 names are English, more than half, and English surnames turned into first names are exactly what the modern American chart rewards.

F, P, Q, U, V, X, Y and Z have no name in the current U.S. top 100 between them. That is not a small corner of the site: those eight letters hold 193 names, so roughly one name in seven here begins with a letter the chart ignores entirely. F alone runs to 40 names, V to 47.

What lives there is worth the detour. V is the site's most Slavic and most Armenian letter — Vladimir, Václav, Vahagn, Vardan, alongside Finnish Väinö and Sanskrit Vihaan. Q is nine names in total and says so on its own page. X is six, of which two are Basque: Xabier and the internationally travelled Xavier. Y's 27 names come from 18 different traditions, so Yusuf, Yamato, Yaroslav and Yannick share almost nothing but an initial.

Every letter page follows the same order: the letter's genuinely popular names first, ranked with their real SSA 2025 positions and no invented ones, then the classics, then unique and international picks. Each entry carries a plain-English pronunciation respelling and a one-line meaning, and links through to a full page with etymology, variants, nicknames and middle-name pairings.

Where a letter has nothing to rank, its page says so instead of padding: F, P and Q open by stating outright that no name of theirs is in the current top 100, and Q, X and U run short because the honest list is short. Each page carries a filter box too, so a hundred names narrow to four as you type.