Boy Names That Start With P

Boy names that start with P in the 2025 data

P is the twentieth most common first letter for boys born in 2025: 21,027 of them, 1.2% of every boy in the file. It has slipped from nineteenth place a decade ago, and its share has fallen from 1.5% to 1.2%.

This list holds the 31 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 Parker, #102 with 3,477 boys in 2025. 0 of the 31 are in this year's top 100, and 25 appear in the 2025 file at all — which takes at least five births, the point below which a name is left out. Three other names starting with P are left out — Pearl, Patricia and Patsy. 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 17,390 of those 21,027 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 Peter, up from #205 in 2015 to #187 in 2025. Preston has gone the other way, from #169 to #299. The shortest name here is Pat at 3 letters, the longest Princeton at 9.