It’s been a few years since I’ve examined popular baby names. I’m always fascinated by what names people choose for their babies and why. So I’ve updated my list to include the 2025 baby names from the Social Security website. Let’s take a look at three of the most popular boy’s names for 2025. I’ll do girl’s names in my next post. Liam, Noah, and Theodore ranked 1st, 2nd and 4th in 2025 for boys. Consider this graphic

Liam and Noah barely appeared prior to 1990, which is why I cut those years off. Theodore, on the other hand, was a very popular names at one time, died down, then has had a recent resurgence. Why? It’s fun to speculate, so I will.

Liam Neeson was a B-list actor until he landed the role of Oskar Schindler in the blockbuster movie Schindler’s List. He was nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars that year. That’s about when the name Liam took off. He’s had some big roles since, including in the Star Wars spinoff movies and the Taken series. That’s my guess for Liam. Gemini AI speculates that the same effect occurred with Noah when Noah Wyle became the star of the television series ER in 1994. I never watched it, but that makes sense to me. I haven’t been able to find a cultural trigger for the resurgence of Theodore, but I suspect it is part of a larger trend favoring old family or “vintage” names. Theodore gained in rank from 2017 to 2020 more than any other boys’ name. My own grandson was named Maxwell (Max), another old-fashioned name that had a resurgence around that time and in fact had a similar long-term pattern to Theodore.

The scales for the charts are slightly different to accommodate all the highs and lows, so you can’t compare one chart to another. They are consistent for each year throughout each separate chart.