For every name climbing the chart there's another sliding the other way. We pulled the boy names that were inside the US top 300 in 2020 and ranked them by how many places they fell by 2024. The drops are sharp.
The list
- Brantley — from #233 in 2020 to #480 in 2024 (−247). The country-pop wave that pushed Brantley up through the 2010s has clearly turned.
- King — from #171 to #342 (−171). The grand-noun trend (King, Royal, Reign) cooled fast.
- Kobe — from #239 to #409 (−170). The post-2020 surge is over.
- Chance — from #279 to #418 (−139). Word names are still in fashion, but Chance specifically lost steam.
- Karson — from #265 to #397 (−132). The "K-spelling for hard-C names" wave (Karson, Kameron, Kyler) is receding across the board.
- Kameron — from #300 to #428 (−128). Same pattern.
- Daxton — from #288 to #411 (−123). A 2010s coinage that's settling.
- Khalil — from #275 to #390 (−115).
- Kyler — from #244 to #357 (−113). Another K-spelling casualty.
- Gavin — from #142 to #255 (−113). Gavin peaked at #28 in 2009 and has been drifting down ever since.
What's the pattern?
A few themes show up across the list:
- K-respellings are out. Karson, Kameron, Kyler, Khalil — four of the ten. Parents who want the same sound are increasingly choosing the original spelling (Carson, Cameron, Kyle) or skipping the name entirely.
- Mid-2010s coinages are aging. Brantley, Daxton — names that felt fresh ten years ago are sliding as the cohort that named the first wave moves on.
- Grand-noun names cooled. King and Chance fall here; Royal, Reign, and Legend are also down from their 2020 peaks (though not enough to make this specific cut).
A drop of 100–250 places doesn't mean a name is gone — it just means it's no longer the rocket it was. Many of these will stabilise in the 300–500 band for years.
More names to watch
Beyond the top 10, several other boy names lost significant ground between 2020 and 2024:
- Bentley — the luxury-car name peaked around 2015 and has been drifting; down roughly 80 places since 2020.
- Ryker — a 2010s invented surname-name that rode high and is now settling back.
- Gunner and Gunnar — the Scandinavian-origin spelling is holding slightly better than the Americanised version, but both are down.
- Legend — peaked hard around 2018–2019 when celebrity use drove it into the top 200; now sliding as the novelty fades.
- Royal — dropped alongside King, confirming that the grand-noun trend as a whole is fading rather than any single name falling alone.
- Kolton and Kolby — K-spelling variants of Colton and Colby following the same path as Karson and Kameron.
Regional patterns
Declines don't happen evenly across the country. The K-spelling wave was strongest in the South and Mountain West — the same regions where Brantley and Daxton also peaked. As those regions' naming tastes shift, they're pulling the national numbers with them.
In the Northeast and Pacific Coast, where naming trends often differ from the national median, many of these names never ranked highly to begin with. Conversely, the country-coded names (Brantley, Gunner) track closely with rural and suburban communities where country music culture is strongest.
What parents are choosing instead
Parents who might have chosen these names in 2018–2020 are largely redirecting to:
- The original spellings: Carson, Cameron, Kyle instead of Karson, Kameron, Kyler.
- Biblical alternatives: Names like Ezra, Levi, and Asher are absorbing some of the appetite for short, distinctive boys' names that the K-spelling wave once served.
- Western surname-names with staying power: Colter, Stetson, and Wyatt are rising as the cowboy aesthetic continues — they just read as more authentic than the invented coinages.
- Mythology names: Ares, Atlas, and Apollo are filling some of the "bold, distinctive boy name" niche that King and Legend held.
The common thread: parents still want something that sounds strong and memorable. They're just demanding more substance behind it — a real cultural root, a historical figure, or a classical source rather than a purely invented coinage.
The cultural context for each dropped name
Brantley is almost entirely the creation of country musician Brantley Gilbert, whose career peaked around 2013–2016. The name barely registered before him, hit the top 200 during his most commercially successful period, and is now tracking his cultural moment — which has passed.
Kobe spiked after Kobe Bryant's death in January 2020, which temporarily pushed the name from its post-2016 slide back up. The grief surge has now faded and the underlying trend is reasserting itself.
Daxton is a clear 2010s coinage — no historical precedent, built purely from sounds that were trendy at the time (Dax + the popular -ton ending). These constructed names tend to have sharp rises and falls because they lack the cultural anchoring that slows a classic name's decline.
Gavin is an older story. It peaked at #28 in 2009 — when celebrities and characters named Gavin were culturally visible — and has been gradually sliding since. It's still a real name with Welsh origins (Gawain) and won't disappear, but it carries a clear early-aughts timestamp.
Frequently asked questions
Will any of these names recover? A few probably will, eventually. Gavin has enough classical depth (Welsh origin, medieval literary roots via Gawain) that it could revive when enough time passes. Chance is a clean word name with an independent existence — it may stabilise rather than continue falling. The invented coinages (Daxton, Karson) are harder to predict because they lack the cultural anchoring that drives revivals.
Does a drop from #200 to #400 mean the name is becoming rare? Not particularly. A name at #400 in the US is still given to roughly 800–1,000 babies a year — enough that a child named Brantley or Daxton will encounter others. A name has to fall below the top 1,000 before it genuinely starts feeling rare.
Why are K-spellings falling faster than traditional spellings? The K-spelling wave was driven by a specific 2000s–2010s aesthetic preference that's now dated. Parents reaching for Carson or Cameron today tend to prefer the standard spelling — the desire to "customize" via alternate letters has cooled significantly since its 2015 peak.
What does this tell us about where boy names are heading? The data suggests a move away from invented names and alternate spellings toward names with clear historical or cultural roots. Biblical Hebrew names, classical mythology, and authentic ethnic names (Irish, Italian, Scandinavian) are all gaining ground as the invented-coinage era recedes.
If you want the rising side of the same chart, see our Top 10 rising boy names of 2024.
Data: U.S. Social Security Administration 2020 and 2024 releases. Only names ranked inside the top 300 in 2020 were considered, to avoid noise from low-volume names where a small absolute change can produce a huge rank delta.