A total of 7,362 boys – or one in every 42 – were given the name Muhammad or one of four separate iterations ubiquitous in Islamic culture.
Meanwhile, official statisticians crowned Noah top of the charts for a second consecutive year, with 4,586 boys born in 2022 given the name.
With different spellings, Muhammad (4,177), the most common, has seen a nine-fold rise in popularity since modern records began in the mid-90s.
Mohammed (1,694), meanwhile, has halved in prevalence since peaking in the late noughties.
Dr Rebecca Gregory, assistant professor in historical linguistics and onomastics at the University of Nottingham, says the disparity is as much geographical and cultural as it is random.
“Muhammad is the most common spelling because it is a transliteration of Arabic into the English language’s Roman alphabet,” she told MailOnline.
Such a spelling is largely found in the regions of North Africa and the Middle East.
Dr Gregory adds that Mohammed, which used to be the most popular, comes from South Asian languages found in countries such as Pakistan but the change in why one has overtaken the other is harder to identify.
“With lots of recordings of a particular name, people try and standardise it,” she said.
She noted, “Some of what the data show is people intentionally using what they see as a more standard spelling so their children don’t run the risk of their name being mis-pronounced or spelled.”
It could also be to do with a specific cultural background or to some extent a preference of the person doing the name recording.
If a parent doesn’t have a preference on the spelling of Muhammad, the person taking the recording might just choose one, she said.
ONS statistics also show that 2024 is the one hundredth anniversary of Mohammed entering the top 100 boys’ names for England and Wales, debuting at 91st in 1924.
Its prevalence dropped considerably in the lead up to and during WW2 but began to rise in the 1960s.
That particular iteration of the name was the only one to appear in the ONS’ top 100 data from 1924 until Mohammad joined in the early 1980s.
Muhammad, now the most popular of the three, first broke into the top 100 in the mid-1980s and has seen the fastest growth of all three iterations since.
In 2020, Muhammad was the fifth most popular name for male British babies, the UK’s Office for National Statistics revealed.
Mohammed and Mohammad were also among the 100 most popular baby boy names in the UK – ranking 32 and 74 – though neither came close to the Muhammad spelling.
Noah, an important figure in all three Abrahamic religions, was the fourth most popular name for male British babies.
Two other Muslim names — Ibrahim and Yusuf — made it into the top 100 for 2020. All three spellings of the prophet’s name, as well as Yusuf and Ibrahim, have been climbing in popularity consistently since 1996, ONS data shows.
Muslims from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds transliterate the name Muhammad differently into English, but all are named in reverence of Islam’s most loved figure.
Despite being spelled differently by different groups, the origins and intention behind the naming are likely shared by each culture and ethnicity employing it.
It is likely that the name is even more popular than the ONS rankings suggest, but the methodology of dividing names based on their spellings makes it unclear exactly how it ranks against other top names.
