Francois

given name · French · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Francois is a given name, with more bearers in France than in any other country, where it is the 5th most common given name. It appears chiefly in French and English, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: French form of François, from Latin Franciscus ‘Frankish’.

rarermore common
  • MQMartinique1 in 110◐
  • GPGuadeloupe1 in 124
  • FRFrance1 in 169

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈414K ●

across 7 countries

#594 ●

of 16M given names

4 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
405 ●

1.6M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 169 ◐

France

Spellings & scripts●

FrancoisLatin · French●1.7M records
ФрансуазаCyrillic · Russian●173 records
ฟรองซัวThai · Thai●64 records
ΦρανσουαζGreek · Greek●0 records

3 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Francoise in BR Brazil, CL Chile, PE Peru and 4 more, François in ES Spain, CH Switzerland, CM Cameroon and 2 more and Франсуаза in RU Russia.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin●

French form of François, from Latin Franciscus ‘Frankish’.

Sources 1

  • Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)

Attested across 18 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Francois is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
FR France#5401,4051.5M rec.1 in 169401KFrancois405
CA Canada#35834,16030K rec.—1Francois207
BE Belgium#3724,34325K rec.—7.4KFrancois147
CH Switzerland#797,4742.8K rec.—235François109
NL Netherlands—6,956△1.1K rec.1 in 2.5K7KFrancois73
ZA South Africa#6096,1405.4K rec.——Francois105
MQ Martinique#45,869170 rec.—5Francois19
GP Guadeloupe#34,98468 rec.—5Francois12
US United States—4,35456K rec.1 in 76K17KFrancois313
GB United Kingdom—4,0852.9K rec.—listedFrancois123
CM Cameroon#162,8384.1K rec.—2François29
CL Chile—1,419124 rec.—8Francoise33

Roughly 401K people in France bear this name (about 1 in 169). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked △ rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages●

  • French1.7M90%
  • English78K4%
  • Portuguese18K1%
  • Dutch15K1%
  • Spanish14K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
French1,736,53290%
English77,9714%
Portuguese17,6961%
Dutch15,2021%
Spanish14,2011%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way◐

Francois is also recorded as 5 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English given name235K records spelled Francois21 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Netherlands, South Africa, Canada

    Languages: English, Dutch, Western Frisian

    Also written François, Francöis, Franḉois, Francóis, Fràñcois

  • a separate given name13K records spelled Francois13 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland

    Also written François, Franc̜ois, Franco̧is, Franc̦ois, Franc̨ois

  • Swahili given name6.8K records spelled Francois3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in South Africa, United States, Canada, Congo - Kinshasa

    Languages: Swahili, Southern Sotho

    Also written François

  • French (Côte d’Ivoire) given name6.1K records spelled Francois2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Côte d’Ivoire

    Also written François

  • English (South Africa) given name3.3K records spelled Francois2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in South Africa, United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands

    Also written François

86 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses●

Francois 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 French, From Latin Franciscus, 'Frankish, Frenchman'.

    as a nameLe grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)

  • In French, Du latin Franciscus, « franc, libre »; fête de saint François d’Assise le 4 octobre.

    as a nameDictionnaire généalogique des prénoms

  • In German, frz. Patronym zu Rufname Franciscus; 152 Träger, in Westdeutschland verstreut mit Nest im Raum Trier.

    as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 6: Familiennamen aus Rufnamen

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.

Over time●

020406019201940196019802000202043 · 1992

Show as table
Francois in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1912–2025
Yearrecords
19127
19146
19156
19168
191710
191810
19198
19209
19216
19229
192311
192413
192511
192612
192712
192913
19308
19328
193411
19357
19365
19387
19397
19406
19415
19429
19436
19455
194611
19479
194811
194913
195010
19519
195222
19538
195416
19559
195613
19579
195822
195924
196013
196130
196222
196325
196428
196523
196622
196727
196821
196924
197024
197125
197224
197323
197419
197527
197620
197723
197816
197925
198025
198123
198228
198329
198426
198534
198626
198737
198823
198931
199032
199134
199243
199324
199428
199523
199629
199718
199825
199912
200014
200114
200224
200319
200414
200517
200617
200711
200817
200912
201011
201117
201211
201312
201416
201520
201615
201715
201816
201914
202014
202113
202210
202312
202413
202518

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 108 years between 1912–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

1400160018002000François I, b. 1494François Rabelais, b. 1494Francis II of France, b. 1544Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, b. 1708François Noël Babeuf, b. 1760François Duvalier, b. 1907Albert Fert, b. 1938François Bayrou, b. 1951François Fillon, b. 1954François Hollande, b. 1954

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).

Evidence●

Attested in 80 sources across 47 countries.

Official registers attesting Francois
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202017K#2,132
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201015K#2,467
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200011K#3,079
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)19915.8K—
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex20204.4K#4,272
BE BelgiumFamilienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register)2008898#1,534
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)2022839—
BR BrazilIBGE — Nomes (census name API)—774#10,844
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—765#9,340
BE BelgiumStatbel — Noms de famille (family names)—655#2,207
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)—418#2,252
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—413#3,164

Reference works 5

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • 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 2026-09-12 data build · 497 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Francois?
We estimate roughly 414 thousand people bear Francois (counting its spellings and scripts) across 7 countries in our records.
In which country does Francois have the most bearers?
We estimate about 401 thousand people bear Francois in France, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled francois.
How common is Francois compared with other names?
In France, Francois is the 5th most common given name of 711,207 given names recorded there.
Is Francois a male or female name?
Francois is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
What does the name Francois mean?
Recorded meaning: French form of François, from Latin Franciscus ‘Frankish’.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/francois

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

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, “Francois” — the 5th most common given name in France. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Francois parses inside a full name →