Muhammed or Oliver: the most popular boys name is...

2 December 2014

"Mohammed is most popular name for boys in Britain 2014"—The Sun (£)

Well, it is according to the parenting website BabyCentre at any rate. In a story picked up by The Sun, The Mail and other newspapers yesterday, BabyCentre polled 56,000 of their own members and found that Muhammed was the most popular name for boys—up from 28th place in the same survey last year.

In order to produce this result, BabyCentre added together boys named 'Muhammed' with all of the alternative spellings (Mohammed, Mohammad, Muhammad...). Spelling variants of other names like Matthew and Mathew were also combined.

The first point to make is that users of BabyCentre may not be representative of the UK population as a whole. Although the proportion of that site's users calling their baby Mohammed has risen, this may just reflect changing user demographics for the website rather than a national trend.

The actual numbers

When a child is born in the UK, its name is entered onto the birth register. Although the figures for 2014 aren't available yet, we can look at the 2013 data for England and Wales.

Oliver was the most popular name for boys with 6,949 children being given the name, while Jack was in second place on 6,212.

Muhammed was the 15th most popular name, Mohammed 23rd and Mohammad 57th. Adding these alternative spellings gives a count of 7,445 boys—making Muhammed and variants combined the most popular boys 'name'.

Whether or not this is appropriate is an open question.

What's in the spelling of a name?

When we say that two individuals share the same name, do we mean their names are pronounced in identical fashion or that they are spelled identically too? It might seem like an odd question to ask, but it's an important one.

The ONS counts names based on their spelling, so David Beckham and David Silva would 'share' a forename, despite the two being phonetically distinct.

Meanwhile, Sean Bean and Shaun Maloney would have distinct names, despite the two being pronounced identically.

If the pronunciation of a name is all that matters, then grouping the variants of Muhammed together would be acceptable when the anglicised pronunciation of these names is identical.

But we also consider spelling differences to be important. There's no real way to tell the difference between an 'Amy' and an 'Aimee' without asking someone how their name is spelled. Phonetically, they are indistinguishable. But my colleague Amy would probably be quite unhappy if I started spelling her name as Aimee.

Perhaps the most reasonable answer would be to count different names based on both spelling and pronunciation.

Image courtesy of storebukkebruse

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