These Are The Most Beautiful Baby Names, According To Science

Baby names are endlessly fascinating because they're so subjective. Some names are more popular than others – and some are falling out of fashion – but ultimately it comes down to personal choice. The best baby name is the one that feels right to you.

Still, it's definitely interesting to dig into a new list claiming to reveal the most scientifically beautiful baby names. That's right – scientifically beautiful. The list was created by My 1st Years with input from a linguistics expert: Dr. Bodo Winter, Associate Professor of Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Birmingham.

Dr. Winter's approach was rooted in sound symbolism: the connection between a word's sound and its meaning. Because some words sound better than others to the human ear, they're more likely to inspire positive feelings when we hear them.

"Using an exciting piece of sound symbolism research from Adelman et al. (2018) as a starting point, we scored a number of the world’s most popular baby names in order to rank them," Dr. Winter explained. "The names that ranked the most highly provoked the most positive emotions when spoken out loud and therefore are likely to sound most beautiful to the human ear."

Both Olivia and Noah – the most popular baby names in England and Wales statistically – feature in the list, but you can check out the full top 100 below.

The most scientifically beautiful girls’ names:

The most scientifically beautiful boys’ names: