The Most Loved Baby Names in America, According to 161,918 Votes

Nov 6, 2026 Abigail Adams, Editorial writer

Every name page on this site carries a small question: How would you rate this name, 1–5? Since 2014, visitors have answered it 161,918 times, across 21,247 different names.

This is not a national survey, and we won't pretend otherwise. It's something arguably more interesting: the verdict of the people who actually come here to think about names — parents building shortlists, name nerds, the curious — recorded over eight years. Nobody else has this dataset, because nobody else asked.

So: which names do they love most?

First, why we refuse to just sort by average

If we ranked by raw average, the winner would be meaningless. 10,157 names — nearly half of everything rated — average a perfect 5.0. That sounds like a golden age of naming until you look closer: 9,000 of those perfect scores rest on five or fewer votes, and 4,256 of them are a single vote. One fan, one click, one perfect record.

So we set a floor: at least 50 votes. Only 321 names in the entire database clear it. Here is the top of that list.

The most loved names (50+ votes)

Aria — 4.90 (52 votes)
Azula — 4.89 (82 votes)
Makiah — 4.88 (50 votes)
Arianny — 4.86 (62 votes)
Naia — 4.84 (55 votes)
Avonlea — 4.84 (55 votes)
Kenai — 4.83 (98 votes)
Lyanna — 4.82 (61 votes)
Rylee — 4.81 (89 votes)
Araya — 4.80 (130 votes)

Three stories hide in that list.

Araya is the ironman champion. She has the most votes of anyone in the top ten — 130 — and still holds 4.80. Raise the floor to 100 votes (only 22 names qualify) and she is #1 outright. Love that survives a bigger jury is the real thing.

Avonlea has more fans than babies. Fifty-five people took the time to rate Avonlea 4.84 out of 5. In all of 2025, 14 babies were actually given the name. The Anne of Green Gables place name has a devoted congregation and almost no congregation members' children.

Aria is the double threat. She's the one name here that America also chooses: #26 for girls in 2025, with 6,130 babies — and the highest average on this list. Azula, by contrast, is pure fandom gravity: 82 votes at 4.89, against just 76 babies in 2025 (#1,644). And Kenai, the Alaska place name, flies the flag for boys at 4.83 on 98 votes — most of this list, like most of modern naming creativity, is girls.

For calibration, the highest-scoring ordinary name is Amy — 4.79 on 78 votes, just outside the top ten. The classics mostly don't live up here at all (that's a whole separate story — see our piece on popular vs. loved).

Read the averages like a statistician

Two cautions before you tattoo any of this on a birth announcement. First, these are small juries: 50 to 130 votes, cast by self-selected enthusiasts between 2014 and 2022 — people rate names they already like, which is why the overall average across all 161,918 votes is a sunny 4.52 out of 5. Second, a 4.88 and a 4.84 are, honestly, the same verdict wearing different decimals: adored by the people who showed up.

Our advice: Treat the rating as a tiebreaker, not a verdict. If two finalists are level on everything else — sound, meaning, family politics — the one strangers bothered to rate 4.8 has a warmth you can feel in a room. Check your shortlist's pages, look at the vote count before the average, and let the crowd break the tie.

See the champions: Aria, Azula, Araya, Kenai — and compare them with the names America actually picks on the 2025 girls' chart and boys' chart.