Most Popular Baby Girl Names in Germany 2025 (GfdS) and Their Meanings

In 2025 the most frequent first name given to baby girls in Germany was once again Sophia, counted together with the spelling Sofia. According to the list published by the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (GfdS) on 9 June 2026, it accounts for 1.33% of all first names given to girls. Right behind it, two names swapped places: Emma rose to second, Emilia slipped to third.

This article gives the GfdS top 10 for 2025 with meanings, origins, Arabic spellings and Abjad values, and adds positions 11–30 from a separate, clearly labelled private source. First, though, a word on why the German list cannot be read like the official rankings of other countries.

Germany has no "official" name statistics

Germany's federal statistics office does not publish a nationwide first-name ranking. The gap is filled by the GfdS, a language society based in Wiesbaden, which compiles data from the registry offices (Standesämter) and releases a ranking every year. Three things matter when reading it:

• Only the top 10 is public. Longer lists are sold; no baby counts are published at all, only percentage shares.
• Similar spellings are merged. Sophia and Sofia, Hanna and Hannah, Klara and Clara, Lia and Liah each count as one name.
• Only first names count. The "Erstname" list used here leaves out second and third names.

GfdS 2025: the top 10 girls' names

The share column is the name's percentage of all first names given to girls in Germany in 2025 (as rounded by the GfdS). Emma and Emilia show the same share (1.25%), yet the GfdS ranks Emma ahead; the same applies to Hanna/Hannah and Klara/Clara (0.92%).

Five years at a glance

The chart shows where each name in the 2025 top 10 has stood in the GfdS list since 2021. The last two rows are names that were in the top 10 during this period and then dropped out; "–" means the name was not in the top 10 that year.

• Sophia/Sofia was 3rd in 2021 and has been first since 2023.
• Hanna/Hannah fell from 2nd to 7th in five years, the biggest fall in the chart.
• Lia/Liah entered the top 10 in 2023 and has held 10th place ever since.
• The leader's share is shrinking: in 2021 Emilia led with 1.52%; in 2025 Sophia/Sofia leads with 1.33%.
• The top is spreading out: the shares of the top 10 add up to roughly 12.57% in 2021 and roughly 10.37% in 2025. Ten names now cover an ever smaller slice of all first names.

Positions 11–30: from a private sample

Because the GfdS does not publish beyond its top 10 free of charge, positions 11–30 come from name researcher Knud Bielefeld's 2025 list on beliebte-vornamen.de. This is not an official statistic but a private sample of about 250,000 birth reports (around 40% of births). Bielefeld also merges similar spellings and counts first names only. Both sources have the same ten names in their top 10, but in a different order: in Bielefeld's list Hannah is 4th and Clara 7th. The "2024" column shows Bielefeld's 2024 rank.

In this range Romy (37 → 28) and Mira (31 → 30) entered the top 30, while Lena and Nele left it. Lilly climbed from 18 to 13; Leonie dropped from 17 to 23.

Names of Turkish origin further down the list

Further down Bielefeld's list there are Turkish names as well. Ayla (أيلا, 42), Turkish for "moonlight, halo", was 100th in 2021 and is 46th in 2025; Bielefeld lists it among the rising names of 2025. Aylin (آيلين, 101), derived from the Turkish word "ay" (moon), moved from 143rd to 97th over the same period. Mariam (مريم, 290), a Latin-letter spelling of Maryam, is 88th. Maryam is the only woman mentioned by name in the Qur'an.

The Abjad view

Abjad works with Arabic letters, so the value of a German name is taken from its established Arabic-script spelling. The values in the tables are the sums of the classical Abjad values of the letters in these spellings.

• First letters: 6 of the top 10 begin with a Fire letter: Emma, Emilia and Ella with alif, Mia and Mila with mim, Hanna/Hannah with ha. Lina and Lia begin with an Earth letter (ل), Sophia/Sofia with an Air letter (ص), Klara/Clara with a Water letter (ك). This follows the classical classification used on our site; some authors classify differently.
• Extremes: in the top 10 the highest value is Klara/Clara's 252, the lowest Lia's 41. At the top of the 30 stands Charlotte: شارلوت = 937, of which 700 comes from just two letters, ش (300) and ت (400). The lowest value is Ida's 16.
• Same value, different names: Emma, Maja and Anna 52; Lina, Emily and Amelie 91; Marie and Mira 251. Lia and Lea are written identically in Arabic (ليا, 41), yet the GfdS counts them as separate names.
• When the spelling changes: Hannah written هانا gives 57. The mother of Mary, referred to in the Qur'an (Al Imran 3:35) as "the wife of Imran" and known in Islamic tradition as Hanna, is written حنة: 63. Ella's spelling إيلا is letter for letter one of the spellings used for Ayla; both come to 42.

None of these values makes a name "good" or "weak" on its own. What the tradition looks at is the picture formed by the name's letters and elements together with the mother's and father's names; for a child's star chart (yıldızname) the mother's name is needed as well. Fixing which spelling to use is also the first step of our paid reports.

Four questions people ask about this list

How many babies were named Sophia? Nobody outside the GfdS knows. It publishes shares, not counts, and estimating counts from shares would be misleading, which is why this article contains no baby counts.

Would Sophia still be first if Sofia were counted separately? The public GfdS data does not say; all we know is that the two spellings together rank first. In Abjad there is no difference anyway: both are صوفيا, 187.

Hannah is 7th with the GfdS and 4th with Bielefeld. Which is right? Both, by their own method. The GfdS compiles registry office records; Bielefeld works with a sample covering part of all births. For the top 10 this article follows the GfdS.

What use is the list to a family living in Germany? It hints at which names will be heard often at nursery and school. But the answer to "Mia, Mila or Ayla?" is not in the list; it lies in meaning, spelling and harmony with the family's names.

This article is for information only. Abjad interpretations rest on tradition and make no definitive judgement or guarantee about any name.

Source: Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (GfdS), "Die beliebtesten Vornamen 2025" — first-name (Erstname) list, Germany as a whole; gfds.de/vornamen/beliebteste-vornamen. The GfdS publishes only the top 10 with percentage shares and no exact counts; Germany has no official federal first-name statistics. Positions 11–30: Knud Bielefeld, beliebte-vornamen.de, "Die beliebtesten Vornamen des Jahres 2025" (private sample, not official statistics).