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. Point at a country to see where its names come from; every country has a page on how people are named there.

AndorraAntigua & BarbudaAnguillaAmerican SamoaArubaÅland IslandsBarbadosBahrainBermudaCaribbean NetherlandsBouvet IslandCocos (Keeling) IslandsCook IslandsCape VerdeCuraçaoChristmas IslandDominicaMicronesiaFaroe IslandsGrenadaFrench GuianaGuernseyGibraltarGuadeloupeSouth Georgia & South Sandwich IslandsGuamHong KongHeard & McDonald IslandsIsle of ManBritish Indian Ocean TerritoryJerseyKiribatiComorosSt. Kitts & NevisCayman IslandsSt. LuciaLiechtensteinMonacoSt. MartinMarshall IslandsMacaoNorthern Mariana IslandsMartiniqueMontserratMaltaMauritiusMaldivesNauruFrench PolynesiaPitcairn IslandsPalauRéunionSeychellesSingaporeSt. HelenaSvalbard & Jan MayenSan MarinoSão Tomé & PríncipeSint MaartenTurks & Caicos IslandsTongaTuvaluU.S. Outlying IslandsVatican CitySt. Vincent & GrenadinesBritish Virgin IslandsU.S. Virgin IslandsWallis & FutunaSamoaMayotteАлександр伟MariaMichaelمحمدLethaboMarieAnnaΓεώργιοςგიორგიفاطمهराम도윤紬นายMohammedOliver

About our coverage. 250 countries. 35 have official registers for both given names and surnames, 173 have at least one, 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 from 718 official registries across 263 countries, tied to scripts, languages, geography and 106M+ etymological links, with each page naming the register it rests on.

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 here is generated by scripts/build_site_stats.py and carries its own denominator. How they are counted.

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.

Each name has a story that it is bursting to tell

All the poems written to it, all the places it visited, all the cultures it is a part of. Mondonomo was built to give every name its due — we do not sort names by how hard they are to pronounce, or by the script they are written in.

Why we built this →

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