Are there illegal baby names in the US? The rules, state by state

Unlike Portugal, the United States has no official list of approved baby names. There is no national registry deciding which names are allowed. Birth registration happens state by state, and each state sets its own rules.

What varies from state to state

American rules are not about the name itself, but about the characters it is made of:

• Accents and diacritics. California, Louisiana and Georgia only accept the 26 letters of the English alphabet: José must be registered as Jose, André as Andre. Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, North Carolina and Oregon do accept accents.
• Length. New York caps each name at 30 characters, Massachusetts at 40, Minnesota at 50. Texas allows 100 in total. Others, like Colorado or Montana, have no limit at all.
• Numbers and symbols. Banned almost everywhere. Curiously, Illinois and South Carolina technically allow spellings like «K8».
• Offensive names. Several states refuse obscene or derogatory names, case by case.

What it means in practice

In practice, almost any reasonable name can be registered in any state. The restrictions catch the extremes: emojis, digits, names hundreds of characters long. The most reliable source on the names Americans actually use is the Social Security Administration, which publishes the names from every birth registration in the country each year.

Baby Bee's American list comes from there: names with real birth registrations over the last ten years. Since SSA data already fits the strictest rules of any state, any match between you two is a name you can actually register, wherever you live.