Minami
given name · Latin script
Meaning: topographic name meaning ‘south’, taken from places all over Japan and the Ryukyu Islands, meaning someone who lived to the south of everyone else in the village (Dictionary of American Family Names)
A female name· listed as female by the registers that count names by sex
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 18 countries · latest register: Þjóðskrá Íslands, 2026
Minami is a female given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Japan than in any other country.
- JPJapan≈1 in 1.6K(inferred from the name graph)
- ISIceland1 in 351K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 500K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Japan (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 128 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.6K (inferred from the name graph)
≈80,000 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Japan, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)topographic name meaning ‘south’, taken from places all over Japan and the Ryukyu Islands, meaning someone who lived to the south of everyone else in the village. Some families have samurai connections.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Minami 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JP Japan | #282 | ≈80,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.6K | — | Minami | 128 |
| US United States | — | 299 | 1 in 1.1M | 661 | Minami | 127 |
| MY Malaysia | — | ≈64 est. | ≈1 in 555K | — | Minami | 12 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈54 est. | ≈1 in 503K | 1 | — | 1 |
| HK Hong Kong | — | ≈47 est. | ≈1 in 160K | — | Minami | 3 |
| NO Norway | — | ≈11 est. | ≈1 in 509K | 12 | — | 3 |
| IS Iceland | — | 1 | 1 in 351K | 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: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present). 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)Minami 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.
In Polish, instrumental plural of mina
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Latvian, Paminas stellēs
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
In Latvian, Pakāpieni
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
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)- Minami Takayamab. 1964JPJapanese voice actress, singer and narrator
- Minami Takahashib. 1991JPJapanese female singer and tarento (1991-)
- Minami Hamabeb. 2000JPJapanese actress (2000-)
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).
How to address them
(machine-generated)Evidence
(measured from records)31 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 18 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Minami mean, and where does it come from?
- topographic name meaning ‘south’, taken from places all over Japan and the Ryukyu Islands, meaning someone who lived to the south of everyone else in the village. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- Is Minami a male or female name?
- Minami is a female name. National registers that list it by sex list it as female: United States (Census Bureau, 2020).
- Which countries have the most people named Minami?
- Mondonomo estimates about 80 thousand people named Minami in Japan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled minami. After it come United States, Malaysia, Australia and Hong Kong; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Minami?
- In the United States, the national register counted 299 people named Minami in 2020, about 1 in 1.1 million residents.
- How common is Minami compared with other names?
- In Japan, Minami is the 282nd most common given name of 366,905 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Minami?
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/minamiThe 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, “Minami” — the 282nd most common given name in Japan. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.