Boy Names That Start With I

Boy names that start with I in the 2025 data

I is the eighteenth most common first letter for boys born in 2025: 31,505 of them, 1.8% of every boy in the file. It has slipped from seventeenth place a decade ago, and its share has fallen from 2.1% to 1.8%.

This list holds the 21 of those names that reached the top 500 as a boy's name at some point since 1880 and are still given to boys rather than girls. The most common today is Isaac, #47 with 5,953 boys in 2025. 3 of the 21 are in this year's top 100, and 20 appear in the 2025 file at all — which takes at least five births, the point below which a name is left out. Two other names starting with I are left out — Ivy and Ivory. Each reached the top 500 among boys at some point, but fewer than one in ten children given it over the last ten years was a boy. Together they account for 23,691 of those 31,505 boys — the remainder go to names that have never reached the top 500, each given to a handful of children.

The fastest climber among them is Ismael, up from #401 in 2015 to #263 in 2025. Iker has gone the other way, from #190 to #390. The shortest name here is Ian at 3 letters, the longest Isidore at 7.