Kanya
loc · Latin script
Meaning: Place name: main city of the Bangwaketsi people of Botswana
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 18 countries · latest register: SSA, 2023
Kanya is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Bangladesh than in any other country.
- BDBangladesh≈1 in 4.5Kas কন্যা(inferred from the name graph)
- INIndia1 in 741Kas Kanna
- GYGuyana1 in 150K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Kanya itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Bangladesh (inferred from the name graph)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 170 (measured from records)
- 1 in 150K (inferred from the name graph)
≈36,000 named কন্যা, est.
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Guyana
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled কন্যা in BD Bangladesh and Ka'Nya in US United States.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Place name: main city of the Bangwaketsi people of Botswana.
Cited for this meaning 1
- African Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Kanya counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BD Bangladesh | #223 | ≈36,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.5K | — | কন্যা | 7 |
| IN India | — | 1,789as Kanna | 1 in 741K | 1.8K | Kanya | 61 |
| BR Brazil | — | 626as Konno | 1 in 338K | 626 | — | 1 |
| US United States | — | 346as Konya | 1 in 961K | 668 | Ka'Nya | 170 |
| CZ Czechia | — | 125as Kónya | 1 in 86K | 125 | — | — |
| FI Finland | — | 30as Konno | 1 in 186K | 39 | — | 2 |
| ES Spain | — | 10 | 1 in 5M | 10 | — | 2 |
| GY Guyana | — | 5 | 1 in 150K | 5 | — | 1 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); MVČR — living population register 2017; DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
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)Kanya is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
another name for Sakti (goddess of power and destruction);
as a nameA Genealogists Guide to Indian Names A Reference for First Names from India
a daughter of Kardama (P); Kali (N); Laksmi
as a nameSunama Sarit (Hindi) Ten Thousand Sanskrit Names
An abundance.
as a nameThe African book of names
Chica joven
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
In men, and adj., emaci- ated, poor, wasted away, to become thin in flesh; n., leanness, Meagreness, thinness of the body
as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language
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.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Kanya Thiensawangb. 1914THMiss Thailand 1934
- Kanya Kingb. 1969GBBritish businesswoman (1969–2026)
- Nathan Kanyab. 1987USCanadian football player
- Kanya Fujimotob. 1999JPJapanese association football player
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
Evidence
(measured from records)39 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 18 countries.
Reference works 2
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Kanya mean, and where does it come from?
- Place name: main city of the Bangwaketsi people of Botswana. Recorded by African Names.
- In which country does Kanya have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 36 thousand people named কন্যা in Bangladesh, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Kanya most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Kanya is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 150 thousand people — even though Bangladesh holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Kanya?
- In Spain, the national register counted 10 people named Kanya, about 1 in 5.0 million residents.
- How common is Kanya compared with other names?
- In Bangladesh, Kanya is the 223rd most common surname of 12,312 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kanya?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/kanyaThe 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, “Kanya” — the 223rd most common surname in Bangladesh. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.