Sem
given name · Latin script
Meaning, in English: Clipping of seminary
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/sɛm/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Sem is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Congo - Kinshasa than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 673K(measured from records)
- NLNetherlands1 in 3.5M
- CDCongo - Kinshasa≈1 in 28K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Congo - Kinshasa (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 170 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 28K (inferred from the name graph)
≈3,700 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Congo - Kinshasa, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Clipping of seminary.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.
How Sem is read(measured from records)
Sem is one spelling over 5 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English17%
Clipping of seminary.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Dutch15%
Shem (a son of Noah)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Spanish11%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Sem in Spanish.
- Hindi8.7%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Sem in Hindi.
- Arabic7.5%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Sem in Arabic.
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Sem 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CD Congo - Kinshasa | — | ≈3,700 est. | ≈1 in 28K | — | Sem | 5 |
| MY Malaysia | — | ≈550 est. | ≈1 in 60K | — | Sem | 20 |
| US United States | — | 494 | 1 in 673K | 997 | Sem | 170 |
| PH Philippines | — | ≈370 est. | ≈1 in 296K | — | Sem | 18 |
| BE Belgium | — | ≈370 est. | ≈1 in 32K | 27 | Sem | 32 |
| SE Sweden | — | 178 | 1 in 57K | 178 | — | 3 |
| NO Norway | — | ≈70 est. | ≈1 in 78K | 752 | — | 14 |
| NL Netherlands | #548 | 5 | 1 in 3.5M | 540 | Sem | 90 |
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: Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017); Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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)
Sem is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In German, männl. Vom. biblischer Herkunft (hebr.
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
In xgn-pro, secretly
as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)
In Portuguese, without
as a wordA Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese
In Polish, initialism of siła elektromotoryczna (“electromotive force”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)
- Santob de Carrionb. 1290ESnot in their usual nameSpanish writer
- Sem Benellib. 1877ITItalian playwright, essayist and librettist (1877–1949)
- Sem Dresdenb. 1881NLDutch composer (1881-1957)
- Sem Shilimelab. 1991NANamibian sport wrestler
- Sem Eisingerb. 1994DEGerman singer (born 1994)
- Sem Verbeekb. 1994NLDutch tennis player (1994-)
- Sem de Witb. 1995NLDutch footballer
- Sem Steijnb. 2001NLDutch association football player
- Sem de Vliegeractress
- Sem van der HorstNLDutch actor
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)
Attested in 77 sources across 37 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 997 | #25,867 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 919 | #26,534 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 758 | #29,390 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 752 | #1,630 |
| NO Norway | SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891) | 2025 | 376 | — |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 27 | #39,279 |
Reference works 9
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Kotík, Antonín, Naše příjmení (nové vydání, 1897)
- Cognomix.it (Nomix s.r.l.) — Italian surname origin dictionary
- Ethiopian name tokens (GitHub lehagere/ethiopian-names, 40/60 condominium list)
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
- In which country does Sem have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 3.7 thousand people named Sem in Congo - Kinshasa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sem.
- What does the name Sem mean, and where does it come from?
- Clipping of seminary. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- What are other forms of the name Sem?
- In the etymology graph, Shem is a form of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Sem?
- A machine transcription gives /sɛm/ (IPA) for English.
- Is Sem a male or female name?
- Sem 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.
- How common is the name Sem?
- In the United States, the national register counted 494 people named Sem in 2020, about 1 in 673 thousand residents.
- How common is Sem compared with other names?
- In the Netherlands, Sem is the 548th most common given name of 101,916 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Sem?
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/semThe 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, “Sem” — the 548th most common given name in Netherlands. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.