Sunil
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Sanskrit: ‘very dark blue’; also said to denote the pomegranate tree or the flax plant
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/suˈnɪɫ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Sunil is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Nepal than in any other country. In India it is the 9th most common given name.
- LKSri Lanka≈1 in 1.3K(inferred from the name graph)
- IDIndonesia≈1 in 12K
- PKPakistan≈1 in 18K
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.
- Nepal (inferred from the name graph)
- #298 (measured from records)
- 6 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 377 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 313 (inferred from the name graph)
≈97,000 people, est.
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Nepal, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Suneel in PK Pakistan.
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)
Sanskrit: ‘very dark blue’; also said to denote the pomegranate tree or the flax plant.
Sources 1
- A concise dictionary of first names
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Sunil 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NP Nepal | — | ≈97,000 est. | ≈1 in 313 | 5 | Sunil | 86 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈23,000 est. | ≈1 in 12K | listed | Sunil | 73 |
| LK Sri Lanka | #98 | ≈17,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | — | Sunil | 56 |
| BD Bangladesh | #740 | ≈13,000 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Sunil | 38 |
| PK Pakistan | — | ≈13,000 est. | ≈1 in 18K | — | Suneel | 51 |
| AO Angola | #691 | ≈8,500 est. | ≈1 in 3.8K | — | Sunil | 5 |
| US United States | — | 7,064 | 1 in 47K | 7K | Sunil | 377 |
| SG Singapore | #762 | ≈730 est. | ≈1 in 8.5K | — | Sunil | 83 |
| GY Guyana | — | 418 | 1 in 1.8K | 418 | — | 2 |
| IN India | #9 | — | — | 3.4K | Sunil | 331 |
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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family 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)
Sunil is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, A male given name from Sanskrit.
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)
- Sunil Duttb. 1929INHindi film actor and politician (1929–2005)
- Sunil Gangopadhyayb. 1934INAward-winning and bestselling Bengali poet and author (1934-2012)
- Sunil Manohar Gavaskarb. 1949INIndian cricket player
- Sunil Thapab. 1957NPNepalese actor
- Sunil Shettyb. 1961INIndian actor and film producer
- Sunil Babu Pantb. 1972NPNepalese politician
- Sunil Groverb. 1977INIndian comedian and actor
- Sunil Amrithb. 1979KEhistorian
- Sunil Chhetrib. 1984INIndian football player
- H. S. Prannoyb. 1992INnot in their usual nameIndian badminton 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).
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)
Attested in 51 sources across 27 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | India Names Dataset — Andhra Pradesh Electoral Rolls (Internet Archive) | — | 34K | #165 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 7K | #3,110 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 418 | #235 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 59 | #3,110 |
| IN India | naampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls) | 2015 | 24 | — |
| IN India | naampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls) | 2017 | 20 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2019 | 6 | — |
| NP Nepal | Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names | — | 5 | #24 |
| IN India | Indian names with gender (Kaggle) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- 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 Sunil mean, and where does it come from?
- Sanskrit: ‘very dark blue’; also said to denote the pomegranate tree or the flax plant. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names.
- How do you pronounce Sunil?
- A machine transcription gives /suˈnɪɫ/ (IPA) for Hindi.
- Is Sunil a male or female name?
- Sunil 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.
- In which country does Sunil have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 97 thousand people named Sunil in Nepal, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sunil.
- How common is the name Sunil?
- In the United States, the national register counted 7,064 people named Sunil in 2020, about 1 in 47 thousand residents.
- How common is Sunil compared with other names?
- In India, Sunil is the 9th most common given name of 3,760,348 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Sunil?
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/sunilThe 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, “Sunil” — the 9th most common given name in India. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.