Melanie

given name · English · Latin script

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

Melanie is a given name, most frequently recorded in Germany, where it is the 95th most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and French, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: From Greek for ‘dark’; associated with a 5th-century Roman saint who gave her wealth to charity.

rarermore common
  • ATAustria1 in 241◐
  • DEGermany1 in 461
  • FRFrance1 in 509

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

≈392K ●

across 9 countries

#615 ●

of 16M given names

5 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
542 ●

3.2M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 509 ◐

France

Spellings & scripts●

MelanieLatin · English●2.3M records
מלניHebrew · Hebrew●2.6K records
МеланиCyrillic · Russian●651 records
เมลาณThai · Thai●4 records
멜라니Hangul · Korean●2 records

2 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled מלני in IL Israel.

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●

From Greek for ‘dark’; associated with a 5th-century Roman saint who gave her wealth to charity.

Sources 1

  • Irish first names

Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

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

Where Melanie is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
DE Germany#95263,299241K rec.——Melanie275
US United States#256225,4621.8M rec.1 in 1.5K225KMelanie542
PH Philippines#84181,672142K rec.——Melanie136
GB United Kingdom#196177,619138K rec.—3Melanie254
AR Argentina#472152,34875K rec.—142Melanie104
AU Australia#154139,25898K rec.—96Melanie266
FR France#124133,370426K rec.1 in 509133KMelanie357
CA Canada#14789,39275K rec.—2Melanie227
AT Austria#4168,67610K rec.—17KMelanie140
MX Mexico#89223,54411K rec.——Melanie141
EC Ecuador#24020,393△778 rec.1 in 82920KMelanie46
PE Peru—13,89011K rec.——Melanie57

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

Languages●

  • English2.3M54%
  • French697K16%
  • German427K10%
  • Spanish351K8%
  • 100K2%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English2,290,87254%
French697,22516%
German427,35810%
Spanish351,0788%
99,7892%

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◐

Melanie is also recorded as 6 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate given name115K records spelled Melanie6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Italy

    Also written Mélanie, Mèlanie, Meĺanie, Melánie, Melànie

  • Czech given name27K records spelled Melanie36 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Czechia, Croatia, United States, Poland

    Languages: Czech, Polish, Croatian

    Also written Melani, Мелани, Мелание, Melan, Mélanie

  • Hindi given name16K records spelled Melanie10 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Philippines

    Languages: Hindi, Urdu, Sinhala

    Also written Mélanie, মেলানী

  • Spanish given name5.6K records spelled Melanie100 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, United States

    Languages: Spanish, English, Portuguese

    Also written Melany, Melani, Mélany, Mélani, Mëläny

  • French (Côte d’Ivoire) given name3.7K records spelled Melanie2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Côte d’Ivoire

    Also written Mélanie

  • Catalan given name3.5K records spelled Melanie2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Spain, Andorra

    Also written Mélanie

66 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●

Melanie 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.

  • Comes from the Greek word for ‘dark’. A fifth-century Roman saint called Melanie gave all her wealth to charity. Melchior [Mei/seoir] (m) A name of eastern origin, perhaps meaning ‘king’. It was said to have been the name of one of the Magi. In Ireland it was found in the vicinity of Youghal, Co. Cork.

    as a nameIrish first names

  • In English, A female given name from Ancient Greek.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In English, The dark or black one; Greek

    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.

Over time●

02K4K6K8K1900195020006.3K · 1972

Show as table
Melanie in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1886–2025
Yearrecords
18868
18876
18897
18916
18928
18935
189410
18957
18977
189811
18999
190013
19016
19035
19047
19057
19068
190712
190811
190910
19108
19119
191220
191312
19148
191520
191614
191715
191822
191917
192026
192116
192218
192312
192413
192515
192620
192727
192820
192916
193012
193117
193216
193317
19349
19359
193613
193739
193853
193957
1940200
1941308
1942388
1943407
1944307
1945335
1946410
1947520
1948955
19491,199
19501,026
19511,006
19521,351
19531,423
19541,859
19552,658
19562,691
19572,474
19582,535
19592,826
19603,662
19613,757
19624,281
19634,268
19643,943
19653,116
19663,050
19673,108
19683,641
19693,925
19704,330
19715,135
19726,296
19736,079
19745,483
19755,369
19765,241
19775,373
19784,996
19795,021
19804,841
19814,475
19824,255
19833,553
19843,516
19853,132
19862,973
19872,745
19882,834
19893,628
19903,813
19913,580
19923,353
19932,987
19942,679
19952,646
19962,664
19972,522
19982,459
19992,649
20002,968
20012,913
20023,484
20033,550
20043,583
20053,495
20064,034
20074,000
20083,714
20093,487
20103,486
20113,289
20123,467
20133,474
20143,701
20153,497
20163,490
20173,240
20182,850
20192,592
20202,528
20212,188
20222,173
20232,121
20242,253
20252,074

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 136 years between 1886–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

1940196019802000Melanie Safka, b. 1947Melanie Mayron, b. 1952Melanie Griffith, b. 1957Thandie Newton, b. 1972Melanie Brown, b. 1975Melanie Lynskey, b. 1977Rebel Wilson, b. 1980Mélanie Thierry, b. 1981Mélanie Laurent, b. 1983Melanie Martinez, b. 1995

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 102 sources across 58 countries.

Official registers attesting Melanie
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020225K#248
EC EcuadorINEC — civil registry names202420K#106
AT AustriaStatistik Austria — STATatlas Vornamen WFS (per-name time series 1984–2024)202417K#263
NL NetherlandsMeertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017)—9.4K#422
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—3.4K#1,179
ES SpainINE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—3.2K#633
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—2.5K#216
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—2.5K#930
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)20222.2K—
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—2.2K#4,837
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)20252.1K—
CR Costa RicaTSE — electoral roll (padrón) names—2K#347

Reference works 3

  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • 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 · 1,338 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Melanie?
We estimate roughly 392 thousand people bear Melanie (counting its spellings and scripts) across 9 countries in our records.
In which country does Melanie have the most bearers?
Melanie is most frequently recorded in Germany, where it is most often spelled melanie.
How common is Melanie compared with other names?
In Germany, Melanie is the 95th most common given name of 154,506 given names recorded there.
Is Melanie a male or female name?
Melanie is a female 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.
What does the name Melanie mean?
Recorded meaning: From Greek for ‘dark’; associated with a 5th-century Roman saint who gave her wealth to charity.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/melanie

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, “Melanie” — the 95th most common given name in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Melanie parses inside a full name →