Popular vs common names

It’s interesting how people (myself included!) often want to avoid names that they deem as ‘common’ which tend to be names that were popular when they were young but aren’t actually that popular now.

For example in England Laura, Sarah and Catherine aren’t in the top 100 and so are actually less common than Bonnie, Navaeh and Ottilie.

And for boys Bodhi, Grayson and Jasper are now more common than Andrew, Patrick and Steven.

Interested to hear whether actual ranking for your country or the perceived uniqueness (names you haven’t heard of often) is more important to you when trying to avoid common names.

(Source ONS.gov.uk latest dataset)