The rarest baby names in the UK at the moment

For lots of parents-to-be, the most important brief on the baby naming agenda is to be rare. Particularly for people who grew up being one of many Emmas/Jessicas/Sophies in their class, there may be a subconscious desire to pick an unusual name for their child that no-one else is likely to have.

But tracking down rare baby names is a tricky business. We're flooded with information about the most popular names (avoid Oliver and Olivia if uncommon names is your thing) but it's harder to work out the monikers hardly anybody is giving to their child.

To help you out, we dug into the depths of the ONS' (Office for National Statistics) most recent data, for babies born in 2017, to find out what was on the lower end of the popularity scale. These aren't names that have dropped in popularity so to speak, but are names that are simply more unusual by definition.

What to read next

In 2017, there were more than 3,000 names that were so rare, they were only given to 3 babies in England and Wales that year. Because 3,000 unusual baby names would be a long old list to plough through, we've picked one from each letter for the alphabet for boys and for girls, to get your creative baby naming juices flowing.