Finn has taken over as Nameberry’s top boy name for 2012, claiming the Number 1 spot held last year by Asher.  Former most popular boys’ name Henry drops to Number 3.

The names on our boys’  Top 10 remain the same as last year, except that Owen and Felix have switched places at Numbers 10 and 11.

Biblical Simon is the name that’s risen furthest on the Nameberry list, up 43 places.  The boys’ names moving the most places up the ladder are:

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Just in case you’ve been agonizing about the lack of good names for boys, Appellation Mountain‘s Abby Sandel presents the case for cool boy names in this week’s The Nameberry 9.

Convinced there are no great names for boys?

Spend a few minutes on message boards and you’ll hear the laments.  “There are so many girls’ names I love, but nothing feels right for our son.”  “Girls keep stealing all of the good names!”

This week’s baby name news proves that parents are discovering plenty of great names for boys.  There’s no need to choose anything as outlandish as Rebel or as obscure as Theodule to find a stand out name for your son.

You will have to do your homework.  In a New York Daily News article announcing that Isabella and Jayden remained the top names in the Big Apple, one mom said that they’d landed on Jayden for their 2011 baby because they “were trying to do something that was different.”

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Yesterday we did a rundown on the divide between the girls’ names that are stylish to the point where it feels like they must be popular and those that are actually, statistically widely used.  It’s especially hard to distinguish when it comes to the names we see appearing so often in berry posts and blogs.

So here we do a similar analysis for the boys, with some similarly surprising results, especially when it comes to those berry faves,…names such as Theo.  It’s easy to be fooled if you live in a place where there are more Atticuses than Aidens in your neighborhood playground.

Once again, the numbers in parentheses represent how many babies were given that name in the most recent U.S. Count.

Abner (162) is stylish, while Abraham (1,899) is popular

Ace (395) is cool; Chase (6,397) is hot

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On the boys’ side of nameberry’s Most Popular Names 2010, Henry edged out Finn to hang onto the Number 1 place that it’s held for most of the year. If you count related names such as Finnian and Finnegan, however, the Finn family would be Number 1.

Oliver, the Number 1 boys’ name in England but only Number 98 on the U.S. list, is in third place on the nameberry count and Jasper and Milo are the fastest risers in the boys’ Top 10.

Nameberry’s Most Popular Names 2010 list counts the number of times visitors to our site searched each name throughout the year, which we like to think gives the discerning baby namer an excellent insight into which names are attracting the most buzz. Our individual name pages received 4.5 million views in 2010, with top name Henry garnering nearly 10,000 searches.  About two-thirds of our visitors are from the U.S., with another 20 percent from Canada, Australia, and the U.K.

None of our boys’ Top 10 are on the national Top 10. The fashionable classic James is Number 11 on our list but only 18 on the U.S. popularity list.

The fastest rising boys’ names are marked with an asterisk and include Sebastian, Sawyer, Declan, Silas, and Beckett.

Look here for our 2010 most popular names for girls.

Here are the Top 100 nameberry most popular names 2010 for boys:

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Once more this year the list of most popular names—particularly for girls—is vowel –heavy, with six of the top ten names starting with A, E, I or O, and five more filling out the top twenty.

As a result, naturally, there are fewer consonant-starters visible, some letters practically non-existent.  One of these is F, with only a single  representative, Faith, in the top 100, and a grand total of nine girls’ names out of the whole list of top 1000.

If we look back a century—testing the 100-year rule–it was a very different story, with 31 girls’ and 34 boys’ names starting with this initial.  Several of them were versions of the same name (variant spellings are nothing new!); for instance, Freda, Frieda, Freida and Freeda all made the list—but not the current Kahlo-influenced Frida.  Florence—no longer visible on today’s list–was represented in 1910 by Florance, Flora, Flossie, Flo, Florrie and Florene, and Frances (which hangs on at #802 today, with Francesca at 470) showed up in such variations as Fannie, Fanny, Francis, Francisca and Frankie, and there were three spellings of Fay/Faye/Fae.

Among the more unusual choices that made the girls’ list a hundred years ago were Fairy, Floy and Fronie.

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