Emma and Noah continue to be top baby names

Published 10:59 am Friday, May 6, 2016

WASHINGTON — On baby names, at least, divided Americans can generally agree: Emma and Noah are tops.

And don’t name your child Isis.

For the second year in a row, Emma and Noah top the annual list of top baby names, according to the Social Security Administration. That’s the third year on top for Noah and the second in a row for Emma, which was also No. 1 in 2008.

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The administration released its annual list of top baby names Friday, and the top five names for girls and boys in 2015 remained unchanged from the previous year. Noah was followed by Liam, Mason, Jacob and William. Emma was followed by Olivia, Sophia, Ava and Isabella. Ava and Isabella switched spots from 2014, with Ava climbing to number 4.

One major change was the girls’ name Isis, which had remained steadily in the middle of the pack of the country’s top 1,000 names for the last 15 years. In 2015, after the name had emerged as an acronym for the extremist group Islamic State, it dropped completely off the list.

That’s a dramatic shift, says Laura Wattenberg, baby name expert and founder of BabynameWizard.com.

“It’s actually quite rare for a name to be eliminated by issues in the news,” she says, noting that the name Adolph was still at No. 555 in the U.S. at the end of World War II when the Nazis and Adolf Hitler fell.