Samantha
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Germanic origin, meaning "right thought" (Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education))
A female name· listed as female by the registers that count names by sex
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 60 countries · latest register: SSA, 2025
/səˈmænθə/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary
Samantha is a female given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 517,508 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2020, which ranks it 81st. In Australia it is the 95th most common given name. Samantha is also written סמנטה in Hebrew, Σαμανθα in Greek and 사만다 in Korean (Hangul).
- AUAustralia≈1 in 530(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 630
- GYGuyana1 in 631
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 Samantha itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. 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.
- United States (measured from records)
- #486 (measured from records)
- 4 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 617 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 533 (inferred from the name graph)
517,508 people, 2020
of 15M given names, spellings grouped
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Australia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Samantha in other scripts: Hebrew, Greek and Korean (Hangul)
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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.
How to pronounce Samantha
- English:/səˈmænθə/(recorded in a dictionary) from Wiktionary
- Spanish:/samaɲa/(machine-generated) model-generated
Readings marked model-generated were transcribed by a model; the others are quoted from the dictionary named.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Germanic origin, meaning "right thought".
Cited for this meaning 1
- Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)
Attested across 19 languages in the etymology graph.
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Samantha, most often first. They share a style rather than an origin.
From the names suggested together in public name-advice forums, in English. A list of what people consider, not a measure of how common any name is.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Samantha 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | #229 | 517,508 | 1 in 643 | 517K | Samantha | 617 |
| GB United Kingdom | #118 | ≈110,000 est. | ≈1 in 631 | — | Samantha | 351 |
| AU Australia | #95 | ≈51,000 est. | ≈1 in 533 | 83 | Samantha | 294 |
| ZA South Africa | #189 | ≈46,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.4K | — | Samantha | 151 |
| CA Canada | #248 | ≈28,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | 16 | Samantha | 298 |
| EC Ecuador | — | 24,068 | 1 in 702 | 24K | — | 43 |
| GY Guyana | — | 1,189 | 1 in 631 | 1.2K | — | 20 |
517,508 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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; NSW BDM — Popular baby names (1952–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; INEC — civil registry names; 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)Samantha 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.
Of problematic and much debated 214 origin. It arose in the southern states of
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, Nom moderne anglais, probablement formé sur Samuel; hébreu « Dieu a entendu ».
as a nameLe grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)
In English, Aramaic name meaning 'listener'.
as a nameIrish first names
In French, Prénom moderne anglais, souvent tenu pour une création sur Samuel.
as a nameDictionnaire généalogique des prénoms
In English, Possibly Aramaic origin
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
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)- Samantha Mortonb. 1977GBBritish actress
- Samantha Cristoforettib. 1977ITItalian European Space Agency astronaut, former Italian Air Force pilot and engineer (1977)
- Samantha Stosurb. 1984AUAustralian tennis player (born 1984)
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)A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence
(measured from records)116 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 60 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Samantha mean, and where does it come from?
- Germanic origin, meaning "right thought". Recorded by Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education).
- Is Samantha a male or female name?
- Samantha is a female name. National registers that list it by sex list it as female: United States (Census Bureau, 2020), Ecuador (INEC, 2024), France (INSEE, 2024) and Brazil (IBGE, 2022), among others.
- What are other forms of the name Samantha?
- In the etymology graph, Sami is a form of the same name in other languages; Sam, Sammy and Sammie are recorded short or pet forms.
- Which countries have the most people named Samantha?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 518 thousand people named Samantha, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled samantha. After it come United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and Canada; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Samantha?
- In the United States, the national register counted 517,508 people named Samantha in 2020, about 1 in 643 residents.
- How common is Samantha compared with other names?
- In the United States, Samantha is the 229th most common given name of 2,815,431 given names recorded there.
- How do you pronounce Samantha?
- It depends on the language: in English /səˈmænθə/ (Wiktionary); in Spanish /samaɲa/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
What do you want to know about Samantha?
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/samanthaThe 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, “Samantha” — ranked 81st in the United States (Census Bureau, 2020). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.