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July 27, 2026

The Fastest-Falling Baby Names of 2025, by the Numbers

Some names lost 90%+ of their babies in a decade. Real SSA data behind the sharpest declines — including one name's collision with a smart speaker.

The Fastest-Falling Baby Names of 2025, by the Numbers

Every name that rises fast has a mirror image somewhere: a name that was just as fast a decade ago and has spent the years since sliding the other direction. Rising names get all the attention, but the falling ones tell an equally clear story — sometimes about pop culture, sometimes about a whole style running its course at once.

We compared every name’s 2015 rank to its 2025 rank in the official Social Security Administration data and pulled the steepest, cleanest declines. One of them has a cause you can pinpoint almost to the year.

The Alexa effect

Alexa is the single sharpest decline in the entire dataset. In 2015 it was the #32 girl name in America, given to 6,053 babies. By 2025 it had fallen to #1,029, with just 243 babies — a 96% drop in ten years, and not one single up year anywhere in between.

Line up the timeline and the cause isn’t subtle. Amazon’s Echo speaker — and the “Alexa” wake word that comes with it — launched in November 2014. The name was still climbing as late as 2015, when it hit its actual peak. Then, every single year after that, it fell. Coincidence or not, that’s exactly the stretch in which “Alexa” went from a name to a household appliance you talk to. It’s hard to compete with a device that answers to your kid’s name in every room of the house.

Curious whether a name you're considering has any hidden associations building up? Check its full trend line in the free lookup tool before you commit.

The whole “-aiden” family faded together

Alexa fell alone. This next group fell as a pack. In the mid-2000s, a whole cluster of rhyming boy names — Aiden and its many soundalikes — dominated birth announcements. A decade later, nearly every one of them is down sharply, all at once:

Twenty-two names, one shared shape, all sliding down together — that’s a whole style losing steam at once, not any single name losing favor on its own.

Girls: the “-aylee / -aylyn” cluster is fading too

The same thing happened on the girls’ side with the “Kaitlyn / Kaylee” family of blended, phonetic spellings — names that leaned hard on the “-ayl-” sound and often stacked a nonstandard spelling on top of it:

Every one of these was inside the top 400 in 2015, and every one of them has dropped by at least 70% since. Most have fallen out of the top 950 entirely; Kaylee is the exception, still hanging on at #255 even after losing nearly three-quarters of its babies. That’s not fifteen isolated stories — it’s a whole naming style that peaked together and is receding together, just at slightly different speeds.

What a sharp decline does — and doesn’t — mean

None of this means these are bad names, or names anyone should feel talked out of. Styles move in waves, and a name that peaked ten years ago is simply past the point where a lot of families were reaching for it — that’s true of thousands of names throughout this data and always will be. If one of these is the name you love, the decline actually works in your favor: it means your child is far less likely to share a classroom with three other kids who have it.

And Alexa is its own case entirely — not a style falling out of favor, but a name that ran into a very specific, very loud piece of consumer technology. If you’re drawn to it anyway, that’s a real and understandable reason to think twice, not a judgment on the name itself.

If you’re weighing a name that’s been sliding, our forecast tool can show you whether the slide is still steep or already leveling off — sometimes a “falling” name has already found its new, smaller, stable audience.

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