Boy Names Starting With M

Ranks are each name's overall position among all 2025 boy names, so the gaps between rows are real — the names in between simply start with other letters. Want a random shortlist instead? Spin M boy names in the generator, or browse the full top 100 boy names.

How common M names are

7.6% of the births in the 2025 boys' top 1,000 went to a name starting with M — 72 names in all, giving the initial the 4th-largest share among the 26 initials. At the top, Mateo ranks #8 among all 2025 boy names with 11,045 births; at the bottom, the 50th name, Mauricio, ranks #664 with 413.

That 7.6% is M's births inside the 2025 top 1,000 divided by the births of all 1,000 names — the convention the reading ranks and counts guide walks through — and the 72-name count is taken at that same depth, not at the 50-name depth of the table above.

M names across the decades

Between 1955 and 2015 the number of M boy names in the top 200 went from 12 to 16, the lowest and highest of the 7 counts. Michael (#1) led the letter in 1955; Mason (#3) led it in 2015. Cut to the same top-200 depth, the 2025 list holds 14 M names, led by Mateo at #8. 2 different names hold the lead across those snapshots: Michael and Mason. 3 of the 50 names on the 2025 table appear in every one of the 7 snapshot top-200 lists: Michael, Matthew, and Mark.

M names held 9.0% of the top-200 births for boys in 1955 and 7.4% in 2015; at the same depth in 2025 the figure is 7.3%. The first-letter trends guide sets M's share beside the other 25 initials for every snapshot year from 1955 to 2015, for both sexes.

Faded and new

9 M boy names appear in at least one snapshot top 200 but not on the 2025 list of 50 above: Mitchell (1955–1995, best #79 in 1995), Mathew (1975–1995, best #148 in 1985), Micheal (1955–1985, best #87 in 1955), Marc (1955–1985, best #89 in 1975), Maurice (1965–1985, best #169 in 1975), Marvin (1955–1975, best #94 in 1955), Melvin (1955–1975, best #95 in 1955), Mike (1955, 1965, best #51 in 1965), and Milton (1955, best #185 in 1955). The years in parentheses are the snapshot years whose top 200 included the name; 2 of them last charted in 1995.

29 newcomers run the other way — on the 2025 list, in no snapshot's top 200: the first 12 by rank are Myles (#100), Milo (#119), Matias (#170), Messiah (#207), Malakai (#213), Muhammad (#239), Milan (#242), Malcolm (#272), Maximiliano (#280), Mathias (#312), Marshall (#340), and Miller (#369), and the remaining 17 follow in the table above.

Both lists are bounded by the committed files — 200 ranks for each snapshot year and 50 M names for 2025, the last of them Mauricio at #664 — so "faded" means absent from this year's 50, not unregistered, and "new" means absent from a 200-deep snapshot, not absent from that year's file.

Shape of the list

By the generator's length classes, the 50 names on the 2025 table split into 5 short spellings of four letters or fewer (Milo, for one), 36 medium spellings of five to seven (Mateo, for one), and 9 long spellings of eight or more (Maverick, for one). The longest spelling on the 2025 list is Maximiliano at 11 letters and the shortest is Max at 3.

8 of the 50 names rank inside the 2025 top 100 (1 inside the top 10), 31 fall at ranks 101–500, 11 at 501–1,000, and none sit past #1,000, so every name on the list is inside the top-1,000 pool the generator's 2025 era draws from.

The 2025 girls' M list shares 1 spelling with this one — ranked separately for each sex — namely Morgan (#559 for boys, #312 for girls). After the M, the most common second letter on the 2025 list is a: 31 of the 50 names begin Ma-, followed by Mi- and Mo- (7 each); the list uses 6 different second letters in all.

M boy names: questions answered from the data

Other letters

Girl names for this letter: girl names starting with M.

Source: every name, rank, and count on this page comes from the U.S. Social Security Administration's national baby-names dataset (2025 data, from Social Security card applications). It is public-domain U.S. government data; names given fewer than 5 times in a year are excluded by the SSA, spelling variants are counted separately, and the data covers U.S. births only. Full caveats on the methodology page.