Girls' Names Collect the Opinions

Nov 6, 2026 Abigail Adams, Editorial writer

Count the opinions on this site and a pattern jumps out before you finish the first page. The most-rated name in the entire database is a girls' name — Kinsley, 262 votes. So is #2 (Harlyn, 259) and #3 (Oaklyn, 242). Run the whole top 20 and 14 of the 20 are primarily girls' names.

It holds at depth, too. Take the 500 most-rated names, work out each name's primary gender from its lifetime birth totals, and split the pile:

	Primarily girls' names	Primarily boys' names
Names in the top 500	321	179
Votes they hold	19,887	10,530
Average votes per name	62	59

Two things are true at once. Girls' names hold 65% of the votes and occupy 64% of the slots — a commanding lead. But per name, the intensity is almost equal: 62 votes against 59. The crowd doesn't feel stronger about each girls' name. It has opinions about more of them.

The boys' honor roll

The boys' side of the top 20 is a distinctive little club — Brixton (172 votes), Onyx (154), Cashton (127), Baylor (112), Kiaan (109) and Reyansh (106). These aren't the classic boys' standards; they're the modern, invented, surname-and-place-name frontier — the same territory as the girls' leaders. The boys' top 10 continues the theme: Kenai (98), Rylan (97), Kipton (91), Avett (91). When boys' names do collect opinions, they're the new boys' names. James and William, who between them have carried millions of babies, are not who anyone comes here to argue about.

Why daughters' names attract the crowd

The birth data explains the imbalance, because the girls' chart is simply a bigger arena. In every single year from 1910 to 2025, girls received more distinct names than boys — 3,717 distinct girls' names in 2025 alone, against 2,861 boys'. More names means more candidates for an opinion. And the girls' side is where the action is: the spelling wars (four spellings of Adeline in the top 1,000 at once), the invention boom, the faster fashion cycle. Parents experiment on daughters' names — that's the deepest pattern in American naming — and every experiment is a name somebody has feelings about.

The vote map is just the shadow of that. Where the naming culture is conservative, there's little to debate: the boys' chart changes slowly, its classics are settled, and settled questions collect few votes. Where the culture is inventive, every new coinage is a small controversy, and controversies are what rating widgets are for.

One honest caveat about the method

A rating on this site belongs to a name, not to a name-plus-gender — so for a shared name like Baylor or Onyx, we can't split its votes into "meant for a girl" and "meant for a boy." What we did instead: attribute each of the top 500 names to the gender that accounts for most of its lifetime births, and count it once, on that side. Every one of the 500 could be attributed (all appear in the birth data). The split above is therefore an attribution, not a mind-read — but at 321 to 179, no plausible re-splitting of the shared names turns it into a contest.

Our advice: if you're naming a daughter, expect opinions — the data says everyone has them. If you're naming a son and want the crowd's current obsessions, look at the frontier names, not the classics: Brixton is the boys' most-debated name, and Kinsley leads the entire site. The full landscape is at baby names by decade.