Barabbas

given name · Latin script

Meaning: The name Barabbas is of Aramaic origin

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Barabbas is a given name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States

Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

The name Barabbas is of Aramaic origin. It is a patronymic, most commonly understood as "Bar-Abbā" (בּר אַבָּא), meaning "son of the father". An alternative etymology suggests it could derive from "Bar-Rabban" (בּר רַבָּן), meaning "son of the master" or "son of the rabbi".

Sources 1

  • Biblical Names Compiled Database

Attested across 12 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Recorded in:

No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Barabbas is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • Due to his depiction in the New Testament as a murderer and insurrectionist who was chosen for release over Jesus, the name Barabbas is not used as a given name and carries overwhelmingly negative connotations.

    as a nameBiblical Names Compiled Database

  • In English, In the accounts of the Passion of Christ, an insurrectionary whom Pontius Pilate freed at the Passover feast in Jerusalem, instead of Jesus.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In English, Jewish prisoner in New Testament

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.

Evidence(measured from records)

No register attests this spelling yet

None of the official registers or reference works in our corpus lists Barabbas under this spelling. The statistics on this page rest on person records, and the related names are inferred from the name graph.

Frequently asked questions

Where does the name Barabbas come from?
The name Barabbas is of Aramaic origin. It is a patronymic, most commonly understood as "Bar-Abbā" (בּר אַבָּא), meaning "son of the father". Recorded by Biblical Names Compiled Database.
Is Barabbas a male or female name?
Barabbas is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
What does the name Barabbas mean?
Recorded meaning: The name Barabbas is of Aramaic origin.
In which country does Barabbas have the most bearers?
Barabbas is most frequently recorded in the United States.

What do you want to know about Barabbas?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/barabbas

The payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.

About this data

measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated

These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.

Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.

Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.

Cite this page Mondonomo, “Barabbas”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Barabbas parses inside a full name →