Baby names beginning with Z

Every name on a birth registration in sixteen national registers. This page holds the Z names — 3,274 of them — and how many babies actually got each one. Type to find a name; punctuation and accents are ignored. Tick the boxes to narrow it down.

How this page works

Which register begins when. The United States since 1880, France since 1900, Norway since 1945, Ireland since 1964, Scotland since 1974, Austria since 1984, Canada since 1991, England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Sweden since the nineties, Switzerland and Poland since 2000, Greenland since 2002, Argentina since 2012 and Belgium since 2016 — plus every name in force for a living Finnish citizen, which is a census of names rather than a record of births. Almost no two of them cover the same years, which is why nothing on this page adds one register's figure to another's.

Every name can be linked to, and 24,204 of them have a page. Searching puts what you typed in the address bar — /baby-names#emma — and that link works for any of the 181,336 names, including the ones with no page of their own. Where a name does have a page it is a link in the results, and it opens the decade tables for every register that holds it. The part after the # is never sent to any server, so a link you share tells nobody but the person you send it to.

The sixteen marks are the sixteen registers, always in the same order — United States, England & Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, France, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Canada, Argentina, Finland, Greenland. A filled mark ● means that register publishes a count; a half mark ◐ means it names the name and withholds the number; a hollow mark ○ means the name is not in it at all. Point at any mark for that register's own figure. They are not added together here, and the reason is worth keeping in mind wherever you do see them added: a count made on one country's rule is not the same measurement as a count made on another's. Each name’s own page does add them, at the top of both its tables, and says in the same breath that the figure is an indication of how widely a name is recorded rather than a count of the people who have it.

This one runs on your own device. The index is downloaded when the page opens, before you type anything, and every search runs in your browser — so there is nothing to send and nothing to log. Where a tool on this site does send something out, that page says so and names where it goes.

What these numbers are, and what they are not

Every figure here is a count of birth registrations from a national register. Nothing is estimated and nothing is surveyed.

The American figures are published by the Social Security Administration and dedicated to the public domain under CC0: how many people applied for a Social Security number under that name, for births from 1880 onward, 375,362,447 of them. The figures for England and Wales are published by the Office for National Statistics under the Open Government Licence v3.0 and run from 1996 to 2025, 18,062,210 registrations. The Scottish figures are published by National Records of Scotland, also under the Open Government Licence, and run from 1974 to 2025, 2,807,762 registrations of 5,954 names. The French figures are published by Insee under the Licence Ouverte 2.0, and run from 1900 to 2023, 87,029,203 registrations of 37,766 names. The Northern Irish figures are published by NISRA, also under the Open Government Licence, and run from 1997 to 2025. The Irish figures are published by the Central Statistics Office under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, and run from 1964 to 2025, 3,608,253 registrations of 6,351 names. The Norwegian figures are published by Statistics Norway under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, and run from 1945 to 2025, 4,643,024 registrations of 1,969 names. The Swedish figures are published by Statistics Sweden under CC0, which asks for no credit at all — they are credited here anyway — and run from 1998 to 2022, 2,461,122 registrations of 12,842 names. The Belgian figures are published by Statbel under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, and cover 2016 to 2025 as a single ten-year block — 439,512 registrations of 3,317 names, with no year attached to any of them. The Austrian figures are published by Statistik Austria under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, and run from 1984 to 2025, 3,212,859 registrations of 23,938 names. The Swiss figures are published by the Federal Statistical Office for open use with the source provided, and run from 2000 to 2025, 1,748,295 registrations of 5,244 names — taken from the office’s dissemination service, which is the machine the figures came off rather than the page that describes them. The Polish figures are published by the Ministry of Digitisation from the PESEL register and dedicated to the public domain under CC0 — which asks for no credit at all, and they are credited here anyway — running from 2000 to 2025, 10,804,725 registrations of 5,004 names. The Canadian figures are published by Statistics Canada in table 17-10-0147-01, and their licence supplies the words of the credit rather than leaving them to us: Adapted from Statistics Canada, First names at birth by sex at birth, 1991–2024. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product. They run from 1991 to 2024, 10,946,126 registrations of 18,426 names. The Argentine figures are published by RENAPER under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, and run from 2012 to 2024, 14,545,778 name-instances of 14,917 names, taken from their open-data file — and they are the one column here that counts people on a register rather than births, and that publishes no sex.

Every one of those totals counts what each register published. For twelve of the thirteen that makes it a floor — the names they hold back are not in them. Austria is the exception, and the next section says why.

The one gap, and it matters most for exactly the names people come here looking for. SSA publish a name only if five or more babies were given it in that year, and they exclude single-letter names. So a name that is missing is not a name nobody used — it is a name used four times or fewer. If you are hunting for something genuinely rare, this data cannot see it, and no site built on this data can either.

Thirteen of the sixteen registers hold back small numbers, and almost no two of them use the same rule. The Americans hide a name given to fewer than five babies in a year. ONS redact a name given to two or fewer in total, under section 40 of the Freedom of Information Act. National Records of Scotland suppress a name given to two or fewer in a year, under section 38 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. The Central Statistics Office name a name as soon as it reaches three in a single year, and then leave every quieter year blank. Canada uses the same bar as the Americans — fewer than five in a year — which makes it the only pair here that agrees. And NISRA, alone of the sixteen, withhold only the number.

Greenland is the second register here that hides nothing at all, and Austria had been the only one. Statistics Greenland's smallest published figure is 1, so a name missing from their column really is missing.

Finland's rule is unlike any of them, because Finland is not counting births. DVV publish a name only where five or more living Finnish citizens hold it — and they apply that five separately to first names and to middle names, so a name held by four people as a first name and four as a middle name appears nowhere, exactly as in the Belgian case.

Argentina is the one column that is not a count of births, and the one that does not say which sex. RENAPER count people born alive and identified as their register stood in September 2024, so an Argentine figure for 2012 is how many people born that year still held a document twelve years later — not how many babies were registered then. And the file that names 14,917 names carries no sex column at all; the one that does carries 169 names. Rather than split a figure between girls and boys on no evidence, the Argentine row says not recorded and counts everybody.

Poland moved its bar in the middle of its own series, as Sweden did. A name given fewer than five times in a year was left out up to 2012; from 2013 the threshold is two. The number of Polish names published went from 978 in 2012 to 1,979 in 2013. Polish naming did not double in a year — the rule changed, and this page would rather tell you that than let you read it as a finding.

Austria is the exception, and it is worth saying plainly: it hides nothing this site shows. Where a name was given fewer than four times in Austria in a year, Statistik Austria replace the district with a code and publish the count anyway. No Austrian name is suppressed and no Austrian figure is. It is the only column here that is a total rather than a floor. The cost is geographic detail, which this site does not use. 6.3% of Austrian births have no district against them, and every one of those births still has its name and its number.

Switzerland hides no number either, but it does not name every name. The smallest published Swiss figure is one baby, so nothing is suppressed for being small. What is limited is the list: 2,724 boys' names and 2,628 girls' names, against Austria's 23,938 for a country of similar size. The Federal Statistical Office state no rule for what puts a name on that list, so rather than guess at it, here is the size of the gap measured: the names they publish account for 69,993 of the 78,153 births they report for 2025. About one Swiss baby in ten was given a name this register does not list. That is a missing name, not a small number, and it is the only silence of that kind here.

Statistics Norway withhold anything under four, and list only names used by at least two hundred people — so the Norwegian column is narrow by rule, and a blank in it usually means a name was never that common rather than never used. Statistics Sweden withhold anything under two.

Belgium applies its rule five hundred times over, which makes it the sharpest here. Statbel publish a figure only “from 5 occurrences” — and they apply that five in each of 545 municipalities separately, not once nationally. A name given to four babies in each of fifty Belgian towns is two hundred children, and appears nowhere in the file at all. So the Belgian total is not a floor with the rare names shaved off the bottom, as every other column here is: it is a floor with a hole through the middle of it.

Sixteen registers and twelve different rules between them — so a name present in one column and absent from the next may have done nothing but fall on opposite sides of two of them.

And one of those rules changes in the middle of its own series. Sweden published a name only if at least ten babies of that sex were given it, until 2003; from 2004 the bar is two. The number of Swedish names published jumps from 790 in 2003 to 3,152 in 2004. Sweden did not become four times more inventive in twelve months — the bar moved. It is the clearest reminder on this page that a change in the figures can be a change in the rule.

The Swedish figures also stop. SCB ceased producing name statistics in 2024 and now refer enquiries to the Swedish Tax Agency, so 2022 is the last year there will ever be here. And what Sweden counts is narrower than the rest: a person's tilltalsnamn, the given name they actually go by, rather than every name on the register.

Northern Ireland names every name, and that is why so many of its figures read “count withheld”. Where a name went to fewer than three babies in a year, NISRA print the name and hold back the number — and they mark that differently from a year the name was not used at all. 26,776 of their 29,788 records carry no published count anywhere: the name is on a birth register, once or twice, and the exact figure is not published. Those are kept here and shown as withheld. A nought would say nobody had the name, which is the opposite of what NISRA are telling you.

France withholds something the other three do not: the year. Where a name went to fewer than three babies of a sex in a year, Insee pool those births into a single record with no year at all. 926,369 French births are in that state — named, counted, undated — and 2,316 name-and-sex records have no dated year whatever. Those show their count here and say the years are not recorded, because the count is not the thing that is missing.

And France will not name a name at all until it has been given twenty times. A name appears individually only if it reached twenty for one sex over 1900–1945 or over 1946–2023; everything rarer goes into one pooled record Insee call _PRENOMS_RARES, covering 1,799,189 births. That bucket is not a name and is not loaded here, but its size is worth knowing: it is the number of French people this data will not name.

One more thing about the Scottish column, because it is not quite the same measurement. NRS ignore accents: in their words, Chloé, Chlöe and Chloe "are all counted as the same name". None of the other three registers does anything of the kind — France records each accenting separately, and the American and British files carry no accented name at all. So a Scottish figure for an accented name covers every way of accenting it, and the figures beside it do not.

Searching ignores accents whichever register you are after: type Aaron and you will find Aarôn. What is shown is never folded — each spelling keeps its own row and its own counts, because they are separate entries in the register and adding them together would invent a total nobody published.

Sixteen registers is still a narrow view, and almost no two of them cover the same years. America runs from 1880, France from 1900, Norway from 1945, Ireland from 1964, Scotland from 1974, Austria from 1984, Canada from 1991, England and Wales from 1996, Northern Ireland from 1997, Switzerland and Poland from 2000, Sweden from 1998 to 2022, Greenland from 2002, Argentina from 2012 and Belgium from 2016 — spans of 146, 124, 81, 62, 52, 42, 34, 30, 29, 26, 26, 25, 24, 13 and 10 years. Finland is not in that list at all: DVV publish no year column whatever, so the Finnish column has no span to be long or short. Belgium is the extreme case among those that do, and the useful warning: a name absent from a ten-year window has had ten years to appear in, not a century. So two peak years sitting side by side in one row were measured over quite different stretches of time, and a peak in the English and Welsh column can only ever fall between 1996 and 2025. That is why a name can look as though it is coming back in Britain when the register simply cannot see far enough back to say.

That, and everything else this index cannot tell you, is set out with the figures on what the name data leaves out.

Common questions

Why does a name show as both a girls' and a boys' name?

Because it was registered as both, and the figures are kept separate rather than merged. 11,854 names appear on both American lists, 2,656 on both English and Welsh ones, 307 on both Scottish ones and 2,453 on both French ones. Some are genuinely shared; others moved from one to the other over a century, which is invisible if you add them together.

Why is my grandmother's name not here?

Almost certainly the five-baby rule above. It is also worth checking the spelling recorded at birth rather than the one used later — registrations are what this counts.

Does a high number mean the name was popular?

Not on its own. There were far more births in 1957 than in 1890, so a raw count favours names used in big birth years. A name's peak year is the more useful figure, and each name has its own page showing the whole shape.

Where do the meanings and pronunciations come from?

Pronunciations come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which is free to use, and appear on a name's own page where that dictionary has the name: 15,737 of the 181,336 do. Meanings are not here at all yet. When they arrive they will come from named scholarship old enough to be out of copyright, and where two authorities disagree the page will say so rather than picking one.