Muhammad is the most popular name for baby boys born in the UK for the second year running, according to new figures released today by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Muhammad outstripped every other baby name, with 5,721 boys given the name, while variations of the name Mohammed came 21st with 1,760 and Mohammad came 53rd with 986. The name beat Noah, with over 4,000 baby boys, into second place, and Oliver, with over 3,000 came third. Arthur, Leo, George, Luca, Theodore, Oscar and Archie round out the boys’ top 10 for 2024.
For girls’ names, Olivia was top, followed by Amelia, Lily, Isla and Ivy. Olivia and Amelia held the top two spots for baby girl names for the third year in a row, but Isla dropped out of the top three after being replaced by Lily.
But why is the name Muhammad so popular for boys?
Britain’s Muslim population has grown rapidly in recent decades. A total of 3% of people in England and Wales identified themselves as Muslims in 2001 and by 2011 it was 4.8%, according to the censuses in those years. By the 2021 census, this had risen to 6.5%, or 3.9 million people.
Speaking in 2014, when Muhammad was then ranked number one for boys in a list by BabyCentre, Professor David Voas, an expert in population studies from the University of Essex, shared his theory with Channel 4’s Fact Check.
He explained that the reason for the chart-topping moniker was based on the name and its spelling variations being highly popular among one specific demographic. Because there’s so little variety among Muslim baby names, Muhammed or Mohammed skew to the top.
He said: “The story basically is that 2 per cent of baby boys are now called Mohammed. The reason for that is that there is relatively little variation in Muslim names, as opposed to non-Muslim names.
“A higher proportion of Muslims give their male children the name Muhammad, in one variation or another. For non-Muslims, there is a huge range of everything.
“Although the proportion of infants who are born into Muslim families is now something like 9 or 10 per cent – a figure that is either high or low depending on how you see these things – a fairly significant proportion of those get given the name Mohammed.”