Theodore, Hudson and Luca are among the top 10 most popular names for boys in Australia for the first time as naming diversity continues to rise, according to data compiled by Guardian Australia.
Oliver remains the country’s most popular male name after a decade on top, and longer in the top 10, but there are now fewer babies named Peter or John than a few decades ago.
Isla is the most common name for girls in Australia, while the popularity of Charlotte has fallen six places in recent years, from third in 2020 to ninth in 2023.
And it’s not just us – many of the most popular names in Australia also appear in the top 100 in the United Kingdom.
The chart below shows the top 10 names for 2023 and their ranks in the previous four years.
Girl’s names are also less concentrated – about 1,300 girls were named Isla and Charlotte but closer to 2,000 boys were named Oliver and Noah. So when all names are grouped together, girl’s names tend to rank lower and make up a smaller percentage of all names. Guardian Australia is using the sex category assigned in the original data.
You can see the popularity of certain names over time by searching or hovering over areas in the following chart. We’ve restricted the data to only the top 50 male and female names since the 1950s – so some names or spelling variations might have missed out.
The chart shows how many children were called that name as a percentage of all children in the dataset that year.
There isn’t a national dataset of popular baby names, so Guardian Australia combined datasets from states and territories. Most states only publish the top 100 names each year, so there is a likely long tail of other names that are consistently popular but have never cracked the top 100.
Our dataset goes back to the 1940s and across that entire span many of the most popular names are drawn from the Hebrew Bible – Michael, David, Sarah and Jessica top the list. There are also few names from a non-European origin in the data, with Mohammed one of the exceptions.
But many of these names peaked in the 1980s and 90s, and have been replaced by names from pop culture and other sources.
Notes:
Guardian Australia was unable to get 2023 data that included occurrence counts from Tasmania, the ACT or the Northern Territory.
Tasmania and Northern Territory data is present in prior years.
There isn’t data on names that had lower numbers overall but were consistently popular among some communities. If a name was consistently the 101st most popular, for instance, it could very well be one of the most popular over the past 80 years. But it won’t appear in our dataset.
