2025 Atlantic Hurricane Season Names, Including One Newcomer

21 Hurricane Names, One Newcomer This Season

Atlantic hurricane season is forecast to be busier than usual in 2025 and some of the names you'll see might sound familiar from previous years, but there is one newcomer to note.

Big Picture: Where The Names Come From

• Rotating Lists: Atlantic storm name lists are maintained by a committee of the World Meteorological Organization and are repeated every six years. This year's list, shown below, was last used in 2019 and begins with Andrea.
• Names Are Reused, Unless: The exception is if a hurricane or tropical storm is so destructive and/or deadly that the committee votes to retire use of the name. If that happens, then the name is replaced with a new one of the same letter.

(MORE: 3 Names Retired From 2024)

In Detail: Notables About 2025's Names

• A New "D" Name: Dexter will take over on this season's list for 2019's Hurricane Dorian, which was the only retired name from that year. Dorian devastated Grand Bahama and Great Abaco Islands as a Category 5, causing catastrophic storm surge and wind damage. It then took a close swipe at the Southeast U.S. Coast before making landfall in North Carolina's Outer Banks as a Category 2.
• Two Names Never Used: Van and Wendy are the only two names from this year's list that haven't been previously used for an Atlantic storm. The list was first used in 1983, which is just a few years after the naming process was overhauled to include both female and male names. We should note that several of the names that were on the original 1983 list have been retired since then.
• What's Average?: From 1991-2020, the Atlantic hurricane season has averaged 14 storms. If the season is exactly average, that would get us through Nestor. But as we've seen in many recent years, including 2024, we've frequently gotten much deeper into the lists of names.

More To Know: There's Another List

• If All 21 Names Are Used, Then What? A supplemental list, as seen below, will be tapped, beginning with Adria. Only two years with named storms have seen more than 21, so it's very rare.
• Supplemental List Is Relatively New: 2005 (28 storms) and 2020 (30 storms) are the two years with more than 21 named storms and the Greek Alphabet was used in both cases. But, it was abandoned and replaced with the supplemental list after 2020 because of multiple reasons such as similar-sounding Greek alphabet letters and their translation into other languages.

Chris Dolce has been a senior digital meteorologist with weather.com for nearly 15 years after beginning his career with The Weather Channel in the early 2000s.