Romanian names in England and Wales, 1996–2025

Twelve names that were not in the tables

Each year the Office for National Statistics (ONS) lists every first name given to at least three girls or three boys born in England and Wales. For Romania there is a table of the 20 most common names for girls and for boys born in each year from 2002 to 2022, attributed to the population register and published by the broadcaster ProTV in 2023. It holds 71 names in all.

Twelve of them appear in no table for England and Wales from 1996 to 2003: Bogdan, Cătălin, Ilinca, Ionela, Ionuț, Matei, Mihaela, Mădălina, Nicolae, Nicoleta, Rareș and Vlad. Each band in the picture is one of the twelve. Its height is the number of babies given that name in that year.

2004: four boys named Vlad

Vlad was the first to reach the threshold, in 2004. Matei followed in 2005, with three boys. By 2012 all twelve had been in a table at least once.

In 2020 the twelve were given to 611 babies. In 2025 the number was 258.

Matei is more than two-fifths of the peak

Matei was given to 269 boys in 2019 and 264 in 2020, the year the twelve reached 611. Without it, the other eleven never pass 347.

Matei was also climbing in Romania. It entered the top 20 there for boys born in 2011, in 20th place, and was 5th for boys born in 2022; its largest count in Romania is for boys born in 2020. So part of the rise in the picture may be a name coming into fashion in Romania, and a fashion says nothing about how many parents from Romania there were in England.

Names are a poor head-count

The ONS also counts births by the mother’s country of birth. Births to mothers born in Romania rose from 1,804 in 2008 to 16,069 in 2019 and stood at 10,649 in 2025. From 2020 (15,713) to 2025 they fell by 32.2%. The twelve names fell by 57.8%.

Per 1,000 of those births, the twelve names were given 16.1 times in 2013 and 38.9 times in 2020. Suppose someone had measured that rate over 2008–2013 (19 per 1,000) and then estimated births from the names alone. For 2020 the estimate would be 32,202 births. There were 15,713: an error of 105%.

Without Matei and Bogdan, no trend

Three of the twelve also appear in Poland’s list: Bogdan (up to 130 boys a year there), Matei (up to 11) and Vlad (up to six). A stricter version of the rule drops any name that Poland lists ten or more times in a year, which removes Bogdan and Matei. For Matei that evidence is thin, so this is a test of how much the curve owes to one name, not a claim about where the name belongs.

The ten names left were given 13.3 times per 1,000 births to Romania-born mothers in 2008 (24 babies) and 13.0 times in 2025. In between the rate moved between 9.5 and 19.7, with no lasting rise or fall.

A wider list gives the same answer. The atlas of Romanian names on this site holds 477 given-name forms, with no counts; most come from cited name dictionaries, the rest from Wiktionary. 125 of them pass the same test: in no table from 1996 to 2003, in a table later. Besides the twelve they include Iosif, Estera, Cezar, Beniamin, Răzvan and Dragoș. Together they were given to 1,293 babies in 2019 and 733 in 2025: between 66 and 81 per 1,000 births to Romania-born mothers in every year from 2012 to 2025. A list this wide lets in more names used by other parents too. It already counts 113 babies in 2007, which may be why its rate is higher in the first years, when births to Romania-born mothers were few.

The three-baby threshold does affect the early years. If only as many of the babies given these ten names in 2019 are kept, chosen at random, as the smaller number of births in 2008 would give, about 82% of them still have a name given three or more times and so stay in the tables; for 2013 it is 96%. So the true rate in 2008 was probably somewhat above 13.3, and the tables give no sign that the ten names were gaining ground.

The same rule, run on Polish names

Poland publishes its full list of first names each year, down to names given twice (five times before 2013), so there the rule can be compared with how often the same names are given in the country of origin. Twelve names from Poland’s top-20 lists were absent from England and Wales in 1996–2003: Bartłomiej, Franciszek, Iga, Ignacy, Marcelina, Michalina, Nikodem, Paweł, Pola, Stanisław, Tymon and Wojciech.

In Poland their share of all the babies on that list rose from 4.7% in 2008 to 13.3% in 2025. The dashed line shows how many babies in England and Wales would have these names if mothers born in Poland gave them as often as parents in Poland do, year by year. The bands are what the tables hold: 42% of the dashed line in 2008 and 28% in 2025.

Set against births with both parents born in Poland, no decline

In 2010, 75% of the babies of Poland-born mothers had a father born in Poland too. In 2025 it was 47%.

Measured against births where both parents were born in Poland, the twelve names were given 0.52 times as often as in Poland in 2010 and 0.60 times as often in 2025, and never less than 0.48. So even on this comparison the names are given only about half to two-thirds as often as in Poland. The comparison overstates what these couples do, because some of the babies had one parent born in Poland, or none. Set against every birth with at least one Poland-born parent, the same babies give a figure that falls from 0.38 in 2010 to 0.24 in 2025.

If the figure for both-parent births had stayed at its 2010 value of 0.52 and all other couples had given none of these names, the wider figure would have fallen to 0.21 in 2025, further than the 0.24 observed. So a rising share of mixed couples is enough, on its own, to produce a fall of this size. The tables do not say whose babies got which names, so they cannot show that it did. Wider versions of the rule, with 24 and 38 names, give 0.59 and 0.68 for both-parent births in 2010 and 0.60 and 0.70 in 2025.

Which Polish names are given in England, and which are not

The chart takes 24 Polish names: those with at most eight babies in England and Wales in all of 1996–2003. Each bar sets the babies given the name in England and Wales, 2010–2025, against the number that couples with both parents born in Poland would give at Poland’s rate. Nikodem is given slightly more often than that; Tymon, Pola, Zuzanna and Oliwia almost as often. Wojciech stands at 0.22, Bartłomiej at 0.26, Paweł at 0.34.

The order holds over time. The ranking for 2010–2014 and the ranking for 2020–2025 correlate at 0.84. Each name’s ratio from 2010–2014 predicts its count in 2020–2025 with a median miss of 14%, although those later years played no part in the ratio. A value above 1, as for Nikodem, has three possible readings: parents from Poland favour the name more in England than parents in Poland do; babies with only one Poland-born parent are counted in the bar but not in the births it is set against; or other parents use the name too.

Why Romania cannot be given the same test

The table for Romania stops at 20th place, and its last complete year is 2022. It does not say how a double name is counted: whether a girl registered as Eva-Maria appears under Maria, under Eva or under both. The tables for England and Wales count her as Eva-Maria and nothing else. In Iași, a city in north-east Romania whose civil registry published a summary of its 2023 births, 73% of newborns were given two first names.

Without counts for the same names, made by the same rule in both countries, there is nothing to compare the English counts with. One thing the ONS does publish: in 2022, 83% of births to Romania-born mothers had a father born in Romania; in 2025, 78%. Among Poland-born mothers the figure for 2025 is 47%, so the shift to mixed couples, which may have thinned the Polish names, is far smaller among Romania-born mothers. A full list of first names by year of birth, with a stated rule for double names, would allow the comparison made here for Poland.

What the hyphen hides

A hyphenated name enters the tables for England and Wales only when three babies share the exact pair. 70 pairs made of two names from the Romanian table have done so: Eva-Maria, Ana-Maria, Sofia-Maria, David-Andrei, Antonia-Maria, Anastasia-Maria and others. Together they were given to 158 babies in 2021 and 56 in 2025, against four in all of 1996–2003.

Some of these pairs are used in other languages too. And every pair given to only one or two babies in a year is missing; the tables give no way to know how many there are.

Where this picture misleads

It leaves out every baby whose name was already in use in England. David, Sofia, Maria, Luca and 41 more names in the Romanian table each had more than 40 babies in England and Wales in 1996–2003, so a David with Romanian parents cannot be told from any other. None of those names is in the picture.

It may include babies with no link to Romania. Bogdan, Matei and Vlad all appear in Poland’s list as well. Mothers born in the Republic of Moldova are not part of the ONS figure for Romania, and how many of these babies are theirs is unknown.

Every count is a minimum: a name given to one or two babies in a year is not published. And the page counts names. It does not count families, and a name says nothing certain about where any one child’s parents were born.