Sunil
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Sanskrit: ‘very dark blue’; also said to denote the pomegranate tree or the flax plant
A male name· listed as male by the registers that count names by sex
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 27 countries · latest register: Guyana, 2025
Sunil is a male given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country, where it is the 9th most common given name.
- INIndia≈1 in 370(inferred from the name graph)
- LKSri Lanka≈1 in 1.7K
- GYGuyana1 in 1.8K
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 Sunil 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.
- India (inferred from the name graph)
- #298 (measured from records)
- 6 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 377 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 365 (inferred from the name graph)
≈4,000,000 people, est.
of 15M given names, spellings grouped
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
India, 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.
Cited for this meaning 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | #9 | ≈4,000,000 est. | ≈1 in 365 | 3.4K | Sunil | 331 |
| LK Sri Lanka | #98 | ≈13,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.7K | — | Sunil | 56 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈10,000 est. | ≈1 in 28K | listed | Sunil | 73 |
| BD Bangladesh | #740 | ≈7,600 est. | ≈1 in 23K | — | Sunil | 38 |
| PK Pakistan | — | ≈7,500 est. | ≈1 in 34K | — | Suneel | 51 |
| US United States | — | 7,064 | 1 in 47K | 7K | Sunil | 377 |
| MY Malaysia | — | ≈3,000 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Sunil | 44 |
| SG Singapore | #762 | ≈520 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Sunil | 83 |
| GY Guyana | — | 418 | 1 in 1.8K | 418 | — | 2 |
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; 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 Shettyb. 1961INIndian actor and film producer
- Sunil Chhetrib. 1984INIndian 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).
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)51 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 27 countries.
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.
- Is Sunil a male or female name?
- Sunil is a male name. National registers that list it by sex list it as male: India (India Names Dataset), United States (Census Bureau, 2020), Poland (dane.gov.pl, 2026) and Norway (SSB), among others.
- Which countries have the most people named Sunil?
- Mondonomo estimates about 4.0 million people named Sunil in India, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sunil. After it come Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan; the country table on this page ranks them.
- 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 2026-10-13.