There is no official list of banned baby names in the UK.
All new parents in the UK must register their child’s birth at the local register office.
Genealogist and former deputy registrar Antony Marr told Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine: “There is no banned list of baby names in England and Wales. If the registrar considers that the name being given to the child is potentially offensive or objectionable then advice has to be taken from GRO [the General Register Office] before allowing it to be recorded. That might be obtained quickly by phone but if necessary the registration would be rearranged for another date, or the birth could be registered with no forename recorded and amended later. I was also told in training to check for combinations of initials potentially being an issue, but apart from pointing it out to the parents, it is their decision.”
Parents’ efforts to choose unusual names for their children do occasionally result in legal battles, which can go against them. In 2016, for example, the Court of Appeal ruled against a woman who wanted to name her daughter Cyanide, saying she was not acting to secure the child’s welfare.
In 2020, meanwhile, Dan and Mandy Sheldon from Chesterfield in Derbyshire said that a registrar had initially rejected them when they tried to name their newborn son Lucifer.
The registrar contacted the General Register Office, who allowed the Sheldons to proceed with their original choice of name.
“Ultimately it is for the informant(s) to decide on the name they want to give,” Antony Marr said. “As a registrar we were told that the main thing was never to laugh at a name, but sometimes you would just have to fix a smile and say, ‘That’s an interesting choice, how are you spelling that?’ Sometimes all you could think was ‘Poor child’.”
