Boy Names Starting With W

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 W boy names in the generator, or browse the full top 100 boy names.

How common W names are

3.4% of the births in the 2025 boys' top 1,000 went to a name starting with W — 22 names in all, giving the initial the 13th-largest share among the 26 initials. At the top, William ranks #9 among all 2025 boy names with 10,545 births; at the bottom, the 50th name, Waris, ranks #2,598 with 51.

That 3.4% is W'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 22-name count is taken at that same depth, not at the 50-name depth of the table above.

W names across the decades

Between 1955 and 2015 the number of W boy names in the top 200 went from 6 to 4, with a high of 7 in 1965 and a low of 3 in 1995 and 2005. William (#6) led the letter in 1955; William (#5) led it in 2015. Cut to the same top-200 depth, the 2025 list holds 6 W names, led by William at #9. William is the leading W name in every snapshot where the letter appears in the top 200 (7 of 7). 2 of the 50 names on the 2025 table appear in every one of the 7 snapshot top-200 lists: William and Wesley.

W names held 4.8% of the top-200 births for boys in 1955 and 2.9% in 2015; at the same depth in 2025 the figure is 4.2%. The first-letter trends guide sets W's share beside the other 25 initials for every snapshot year from 1955 to 2015, for both sexes.

Faded and new

Every W boy name that appears in any snapshot's top 200 is also on the 2025 list of 50 above, so no faded names exist for this letter at the committed depths.

41 newcomers run the other way — on the 2025 list, in no snapshot's top 200: the first 12 by rank are Waylon (#56), Walker (#78), Wells (#347), Winston (#382), Wilder (#431), Westley (#619), Wylder (#671), Wilson (#673), Westin (#689), Wes (#716), Westyn (#724), and Waylen (#849), and the remaining 29 follow in the table above.

Both lists are bounded by the committed files — 200 ranks for each snapshot year and 50 W names for 2025, the last of them Waris at #2,598 — 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 9 short spellings of four letters or fewer (Wade, for one), 39 medium spellings of five to seven (William, for one), and 2 long spellings of eight or more (Wolfgang, for one). The longest spellings on the 2025 list, at 8 letters, are Wolfgang and Whitaker; the shortest is Wes at 3.

6 of the 50 names rank inside the 2025 top 100 (1 inside the top 10), 6 fall at ranks 101–500, 10 at 501–1,000, and 28 sit past #1,000, outside the top-1,000 list the generator's 2025 era draws from.

The 2025 girls' W list shares 11 spellings with this one — ranked separately for each sex — namely Wyatt (#38 for boys, #1,483 for girls), Wesley (#52 for boys, #1,926 for girls), Walker (#78 for boys, #1,961 for girls), Wilder (#431 for boys, #3,572 for girls), Wylder (#671 for boys, #3,707 for girls), Wren (#1,090 for boys, #231 for girls), Wylie (#1,182 for boys, #2,689 for girls), Wisdom (#1,251 for boys, #2,819 for girls), Wynn (#1,726 for boys, #1,709 for girls), Whitley (#1,823 for boys, #677 for girls), and Winter (#1,990 for boys, #426 for girls). After the W, the most common second letter on the 2025 list is a: 14 of the 50 names begin Wa-, followed by We- (12); the list uses 7 different second letters in all.

W boy names: questions answered from the data

Other letters

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

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.