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50 Fantasy Baby Names Real Parents Are Actually Using

Fifty fantasy and sci-fi baby names, every one chosen by at least 30 American families last year — and the 32 that still went to fewer than 500 kids.

Most “fantasy baby names” lists are a costume box. They’re full of names nobody has ever actually given an American child, mixed in with a few that are secretly enormous, and there is never a number anywhere on the page to tell you which is which.

So here are 50 names from fantasy and science fiction that clear one simple bar: at least 30 American families chose each of them for a real baby in 2025. Nothing on this list is theoretical. Some are top-30 names you’d never guess had a franchise attached; the rarest went to 33 children in the entire country. The interesting part is that you cannot tell which is which by looking at them.

The 32 that are still rare

Thirty-two of the 50 went to fewer than 500 American kids last year. That’s the group most people are actually hunting for — recognizable if you know the source, invisible if you don’t.

A word on scale, because rank numbers in the thousands are easy to misread. At 33 babies a year, Sirius is a name your child will almost certainly never share with a classmate. At 427, Anakin is uncommon but no longer startling — that is roughly thirteen times as many families making the same call, and you would meet one eventually. Both of those are perfectly good places to be. They are just different places, and the gap between them is wider than the word “rare” suggests.

A few in that table are climbing fast enough that the number will look different in three years. Aslan is up 583% in a decade and hit its highest-ever count in 2025. Azula is up 764%, Rue up 526%, and Rhaenyra did not exist as an American name at all before 2022.

The 18 that already arrived

The other end of this list is where it gets funny, because several of these are names you’d never file as “fantasy” at all.

Lucy is #24 with 6,176 girls, and she is also the youngest Pevensie. Luna is #27 — it was #342 as recently as 2010, climbed to #10 in 2022 and 2023, and is at 6,076 now. Willow sits at #44. Jasper is #129 and Emmett is #121, both of which spent the late 2000s attached to the Cullen family and have long since outgrown it. Rosalie (1,797) and Esme (1,032) came from the same place and are both still rising.

Bella is the clearest arc of the group: 1,664 girls in 2005, then 2,788 in 2008 as the first Twilight film landed, peaking at 5,136 in 2010. It’s at 2,129 today — well down from that peak, and still comfortably inside the top 150. Edward (1,591) rode the same wave from a much older base and has settled at #224.

The rest of the arrived group: Arya at 1,858, Finn at 1,702, Leia at 1,033, Ariel at 851, Kylo at 797, Trinity at 725, Lyra at 711, Caspian at 614, and Atreus at 504 — the closest name to the line, eating into the rare list by four children.

Caspian and Lyra both hit all-time highs in 2025, Caspian up 485% in ten years. Neither is common. Both are on the way.

None of these are worse names for being popular. A name at #27 got there because thousands of families independently decided it was lovely, which is decent evidence that it is.

When a franchise builds a name from nothing

A few of these did not meaningfully exist before their source did, and the birth records show it cleanly.

• Kylo — 8 boys in 2014. The Force Awakens opened in December 2015. By 2016 it was 238, and it’s at 797 today.
• Atreus — 8 boys in 2017, the year before the 2018 God of War released. In 2018: 160. It peaked at 674 in 2023 and sits at 504 now.
• Rhaenyra — does not appear in the record at all before 2022, the year House of the Dragon premiered. 31 girls that year, 127 the next.
• Khaleesi — first appears in 2011, the year Game of Thrones premiered, at 28 girls. It hit 565 in 2018 and is at 410 now. It is, strictly speaking, a title rather than a name, which has not slowed it down.

And when the bump doesn’t hold

Two names on this list are useful warnings about reading a spike as a trend.

Wednesday went from 97 girls in 2022 to 154 in 2023, following the show’s November 2022 premiere. Then 75 in 2024, and 37 in 2025 — lower than it was before the bump. Elsa did the same thing on a bigger scale: 566 girls in 2013, 1,140 in 2014 after Frozen, and then a decade of steady decline to 216 today, below its pre-Frozen level.

If you’re choosing a name partly because it’s rare, a fresh franchise spike is the least reliable kind of rare there is. Most of the names in the first table have been quietly uncommon for years, which is a far more durable thing to bet on.

Every count on this page is a number of real American children, taken from the official national birth record that runs back to 1880.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data, 1880–2025.