Boy Names Starting With Y

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

How common Y names are

Measured by births, Y is the 24th initial of 26 for boys in 2025: its 10 names inside the top 1,000 add up to 0.27% of that list's births. The letter's #1 name, Yusuf, holds overall rank #450 with 698 births; its 50th and last name, Yandel, was recorded 46 times at #2,795.

That 0.27% is Y'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 10-name count is taken at that same depth, not at the 50-name depth of the table above.

Y names across the decades

None of the 7 snapshot years, 1955 through 2015, has a boy name starting with Y inside its top 200, so there is no decade table to show for this letter. Cut to the same top-200 depth, the 2025 list holds no Y name at all — the letter's first entry that year, Yusuf, sits at #450.

Because no Y name reaches a top-200 list in any of those years, the letter's share of top-200 births is zero in every snapshot and in 2025 alike. The first-letter trends guide sets Y's share beside the other 25 initials for every snapshot year from 1955 to 2015, for both sexes.

Faded and new

Because no Y boy name reaches any snapshot's top 200, there is nothing to list as faded: the 7 snapshot files contain no Y entries to set against the 2025 table.

All 50 names on the 2025 Y list are absent from every snapshot top 200; the first 12 by rank are Yusuf (#450), Yahya (#616), Yosef (#665), Yehuda (#741), Yousef (#745), Yahir (#816), Yael (#818), Yisroel (#826), Yadiel (#839), Yitzchok (#911), Yeshua (#1,007), and Yaakov (#1,025), and the remaining 38 follow in the table above.

Read both lists against the depths that produce them — 200 ranks per snapshot year, 50 names for Y in 2025 with the last at #2,795: a name missing from a snapshot may sit below rank 200 that year, and a name missing from the 2025 list may sit below Yandel; the committed files do not say.

Shape of the list

3 of the 50 names on the 2025 list run to eight letters or more (Yitzchok, for one), 7 stop at four or fewer (Yael, for one), and the remaining 40 sit in the five-to-seven-letter middle (Yusuf, for one). The longest spellings on the 2025 list, at 8 letters, are Yitzchok, Yehoshua, and Yitzchak; the shortest, at 3, are Yug and Yan.

40 of the 50 names rank past #1,000, beyond the top-1,000 list the generator's 2025 era samples; the rest divide into 0 inside the top 100, 1 at ranks 101–500, and 9 at 501–1,000.

2 names on this list also appear on the 2025 girls' Y list, each ranked separately per sex by the SSA: Yael (#818 for boys, #1,642 for girls) and Yuri (#1,825 for boys, #1,533 for girls). Second letters on the 2025 list number 5; a leads them, opening 23 of the 50 names (Ya-), with Yo- (11) next.

Y boy names: questions answered from the data

Other letters

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

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.