Be proud of your name

Every name, and where it is written down

Every name has a page: where it is recorded and which register attests it, how it is spelled in every script, and what it means where a source says.

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Names of the world

A common name from each country, written the way it is written there. Tap or point at a country to see where its names come from; every country has a page on how people are named there.

Andorra, Antigua & Barbuda, Anguilla, American Samoa, Aruba, Åland Islands, Barbados, Bahrain, Bermuda, Caribbean Netherlands, Bouvet Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Cook Islands, Cape Verde, Curaçao, Christmas Island, Dominica, Micronesia, Faroe Islands, Grenada, French Guiana, Guernsey, Gibraltar, Guadeloupe, South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands, Guam, Hong Kong, Heard & McDonald Islands, Isle of Man, British Indian Ocean Territory, Jersey, Kiribati, Comoros, St. Kitts & Nevis, Cayman Islands, St. Lucia, Liechtenstein, Monaco, St. Martin, Marshall Islands, Macao, Northern Mariana Islands, Martinique, Montserrat, Malta, Mauritius, Maldives, Nauru, French Polynesia, Pitcairn Islands, Palau, Réunion, Seychelles, Singapore, St. Helena, Svalbard & Jan Mayen, San Marino, São Tomé & Príncipe, Sint Maarten, Turks & Caicos Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, U.S. Outlying Islands, Vatican City, St. Vincent & Grenadines, British Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands, Wallis & Futuna, Samoa, Mayotte, Александр, 伟, Maria, Michael, محمد, Lethabo, Marie, Anna, Γεώργιος, გიორგი, فاطمه, राम, 도윤, 紬, นาย, Mohammed, Oliver,

About our coverage. 250 countries. 35 have official registers for both given names and surnames, 173 publish one of the two, 36 rest on our record corpus alone, and 6 hold no name data beyond their languages. Every page says which it is, and so does the card beside the map.

Browse all 250 countries →

Why names are the hard part

Grammar is a closed set. Names are not.

A language has a few thousand function and grammar words, and then an open-ended universe of proper names. Of the 257.4M+ distinct spellings in our corpus, 191.2M+ are labelled person, organisation or place. Names do not generalise the way words do: a model that handles Paris will still mangle Nguyễn Thị Hương or محمد الراشد, and the cost lands as duplicate records, identity matches that miss, and voice agents that mispronounce every caller whose name is not English.

What sits behind this site is not a fine-tuned model. It is 18.4B+ analysed records and 718 official registries, covering the 250 countries of the atlas, tied to scripts, languages, geography and 106M+ etymological links, with each page saying where its figures came from.

18.4B+
Records analyzed

Rows ingested from every source. Records are not people: one person can appear in many. method

191.2M+
Named-entity spellings

Unique spellings labelled person, organization or place.

718
Official registries

Distinct source ids in the official-registry table.

106M+
Etymology links

Typed edges in the etymology graph, all predicates.

Every figure is recomputed at each data build and says exactly what it counts. How we count →

The country atlas

How names work in each of 250 countries, and the commonest ones as the register published them.

Naming traditions

Where names come from and how they are built, written once per tradition rather than once per border.

The models

Parse a full name, classify it, transliterate it, and see the graph behind it.

What people ask

What 931,090 real questions about names turn out to be asking — and which of them a page like this can answer.

From the library

All 44 articles · 6 books

The same data, through an API

Parsing, classification, transliteration and the name graph run as services behind these pages. They are available for identity resolution, KYC and AML screening, CRM deduplication and localisation.

For business

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If a name is not proper, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.

孔夫子 (Confucius), The Analects, XIII.3