The Daily Mail has published a tongue‑in‑cheek “poshometer” that assigns a socio‑economic rating to baby names using a sample of Office for National Statistics records, finding Hamish and Juliette among the names most associated with higher social classes and Destiny and Brooklyn among those most associated with working‑class families.
The tool, built from ONS data, calculates an average socio‑economic score for each name by measuring how frequently a name appears across socio‑economic groups derived from parents’ occupations. The Mail’s analysis reports that, when excluding names that have appeared fewer than 100 times since 2001, Hamish ranks as the poshest boys’ name and Juliette as the poshest girls’ name. At the lower end of the scale, Destiny is identified as the most working‑class girls’ name and Brooklyn as the least posh boys’ name. The ONS also reported that Muhammad was the most popular boys’ name in England and Wales in 2024 for the second consecutive year.
The underlying socio‑economic classification used by the analysis is the National Statistics Socio‑economic Classification (NS‑SEC), which groups individuals according to occupations into categories that range from higher managerial and professional roles to those who are long‑term unemployed. The ONS dataset used for the Mail’s tool comprises a sample of roughly 10% of births in England and Wales for each year, with socio‑economic codes assigned from the recorded occupations of parents. The Mail’s algorithm calculates, for each name, the proportion of babies given that name within each NS‑SEC group and then derives a mean average score intended to reflect a name’s class association. It also produces a time‑series measure to show how that association has changed across years.
The analysis notes changes in which names are associated with particular social groups. Names historically shouted across the quadrangle at elite schools, such as Fabian and Marcel, are now recorded more widely across Britain, and some names once associated with the upper echelons, including Diana, appear more frequently among families in other social strata, the Mail reports. The upper classes, the Mail adds, still show relative preference for names such as Juliette and Henrietta for girls and Hugh among men in professions including medicine, law and architecture.
The Mail’s chronology of certain names highlights long‑term shifts. Different spellings of a single name have followed distinct trajectories: Mohammed entered the ONS top‑100 boys’ names a century ago, debuting at 91st in 1924, while Muhammad did not break into the top 100 until the mid‑1980s and has since grown rapidly. The Mail cited the expansion of Muslim communities in the UK and the public profiles of sporting figures bearing the name as factors that coincided with its rise.
The paper and its methodology make clear limitations of the findings. Because the ONS data used is a sample rather than a complete register, and socio‑economic coding is applied to only a portion of birth records, names that appear infrequently in the dataset will have less reliable classifications. The Mail also cautions that the tool’s results are a snapshot based on available records and that naming patterns can reflect cultural trends, migration and changing patterns of employment over time.
Observers of British naming practices say the analysis illustrates how names can shift in social meaning as they spread across regions and occupational groups. The Mail’s poshometer allows readers to look up a name’s average socio‑economic score and to see how that score has moved across years, providing a data‑driven view of the changing relationship between names and class in England and Wales.