Every State's Most Distinctive Baby Name in 2025

When we look at baby name rankings, we often focus on the names that top the leaderboard and are given to the most babies in a state or region. But in this post, we set out to explore the names that are not necessarily the most popular in each state, but the most uniquely local.

Using the 2025 Social Security Administration (SSA) state data, we compared each name's share of births in a state with its share of births nationwide to find the names with the biggest gaps.

Hawaii has the clearest outliers, which makes sense: names with local Hawaiian or Pacific cultural roots may have a real presence in Hawaii while remaining rare across the country overall. For example, Kaia is 13x more common in Hawaii than it is nationally. Hawaii also has the biggest gap in the country, with Nainoa being 319x more common in Hawaii than nationwide, and Mahina close behind at 256x.

Most states are much less extreme, but still have their own unique standouts. In a typical state, the most distinctive name in its top 10 is about 2.5x more common than it is nationally, rising to about 4.2x more common when looking at the most distinctive name in its top 100.

A few names define several states at once, taking on a more regional presence. Lainey is the most distinctive top 10 girl name across six Midwestern states — Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio, and South Dakota — while Waylon does the same across six Southern ones: Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Both rank only in the middle of the national list — Lainey around #30 and Waylon around #56 — so their sharp regional concentration is easy to miss in the nationwide rankings.

One caveat: ratios can get especially large when a name is rare nationally. A name does not need to be used by thousands of babies to be distinctive; it just needs to be used much more heavily in one state than elsewhere.

For this reason, our maps and charts allow you to switch between each state's top 10 and deeper top 100. The top 10 view highlights names that are both distinctive and relatively common, while the top 100 view surfaces more niche local favorites that may not dominate the rankings, but still say something interesting about where they are used.