Data out today from a parenting website suggests that “Muhammad” is now the UK’s top name for baby boys, but it doesn’t look at the full data.
It was widely reported this morning that Muhammad is the UK’s most popular boy’s name in 2014. That means more babies born this year have been given the name Muhammad than any other. But it’s not true – and there are problems with the data
This isn’t government data. The numbers come from BabyCentre.co.uk, which describes itself as “the UK’s number one pregnancy and parenting website”. They looked at 56,157 babies born to their members so far this year to come up with their list:
1. Muhammad.
2. Oliver.
3. Jack.
4. Noah.
5. Jacob.
6. Charlie.
7. Harry.
8. Joshua.
9. James.
10. Ethan.
Unfortunately, they won’t release a complete data set, including the numbers, due to privacy concerns. So we can’t tell if the difference between top names is a few dozen babies – or a few hundred.
They also combined names with variant spellings – so Mohammed, Muhammad and Mohammad were all grouped under one name, leading to it topping the chart. Oliver came second – but Ollie was listed separately.
There’s clearly a lot of effort behind the charts, which looked at 56,157 babies born to their UK members this year. But for comparison’s sake, there were 698,512 UK births in 2013. So this sample is likely less than 8%.
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Office for National Statistics
In comparison, the ONS releases data on the most popular baby names in England and Wales every year – and that data is as complete as possible. Of course, it’s not as up-to-date – we’ll get the 2014 data in August next year – but it’s much more reliable.
In the ONS data for 2013, Oliver tops the charts when you don’t combine names – and Muhammad doesn’t even make the top ten. In fact, without combining variants, “Muhammad” barely makes it to 15th.
If we combine variant spellings, again, Muhammad doesn’t top the charts, but by combining Muhammad, Mohammad and Mohammed, it does make the top 10. Oliver (and variant Ollie) are knocked out of place by Harry/Henry, with over 9,000 babies receiving the name last year.
And if we’d combined Jacob, Jake, and Jack, they would have stomped the opposition, with 13,649 babies carrying those names (we didn’t do that because Jack can also be a shortening of Jonathan/John).
Here’s the full list:
1. Henry/Harry.
2. Jack and Jake.
3. Oliver and Ollie.
4. Muhammad/Mohammed/Mohammad.
5. Jacob/Jake.
6. Charlie/Charles.
7. Thomas/Tommy.
8. William/Liam.
9. James/Jamie.
10. Oscar.
So, yes, Muhammad is a significant name in the UK, if you combine the variant spellings. But in the ONS’s top 100, the only other obviously Islamic name is Ibrahim – suggesting that Muslim families who do use traditional names have a much smaller pool to choose from. Thus those names crop up a lot.
