Top 50 most beautiful baby names confirmed by boffins – is your child’s name on the list?

BOFFINS have confirmed the 50 most beautiful-sounding baby names.

Scientists have settled the age-old playground debate by looking into the phonetics of monikers which are the easiest on the ears.

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The study, conducted by in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, analysed which names stirred up the most emotion when spoken aloud.

It delved into the sounds, patterns and structures of names popular with parents in both the UK and the US.

Each of these aspects contributes to the satisfaction of saying certain names - although cultural influences, gender and family history admittedly play a part too.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Sophia topped the list of girls' names, while Zayn proved the most pleasing sounding for boys in the UK.

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The research, conducted by Dr Bodo Winter, also determined Americans preferred the name Matthew.

Meaning "gift of God", experts say the traditional name has many positive connotations associated with it when spoken aloud. 

Zoe ranked in second place for both countries, while Julian won the battle Stateside and Jesse triumphed in Britain.

In the UK, Rosie, Sophie, Ivy Phoebe, Violet, Willow, Hannah and Ellie made up the rest of the girls' top ten.

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Louis, William, Freddie, George, Ali, Daniel and Riley finished off the top ten for the boys.

Dr Winter, an associate professor of cognitive linguistics at the university, also noticed that names begging with the letter 'E' were a hit

The likes of Ellie, Emily, Evelyn, Eva and Elena earned the spots nine to thirteen in the extraordinary list.

Vegetation-inspired monikers also proved popular, as Ivy, Lily, and Violet all appeared in the top 25.

Dr Winter began his work after being inspired by a study published in 2018 by The University of Warwick, which analyzed words, rather than names, to determine which ones spark emotions.

He explained: "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.

"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."

MUSIC TO YOUR EARS

Dr Winter then got to work by compiling the top 100 names for boys and girls in both the UK and US and translating them phonetically.

This broke down each name into syllables, before capitalizing the sounds of letters that can be emphasised when they are pronounced.

Names that could not be converted into this format were ditched from the study.

Dr Winter continued: "Once we had a list of the 50 most popular baby names for UK boys and girls, and US boys and girls, we then moved onto scoring each name.

"Finally, we calculated the sum of each name's score, using these final figures to rank each list of top 50 names."

We previously revealed how the top 50 worst-ever baby names were ranked.

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Adolf, Sadman, Ebolah, Satan, Lucifer and Danger are among some of the worst choices on the list.

The girls list featured a number of names more commonly associated with other items such as Flora, Maybelline and Chardonnay.