Mercy

given name · Swahili · Latin script

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

Mercy is a given name, most frequently recorded in Kenya, where it is the 6th most common given name. It appears chiefly in Swahili and English, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: habitational name from places so named in Allier, Meuthe-etMoselle, and Yonne, derived from the Latin personal name Marcius, Martius, or Mercius + the locative suffix -acum.

rarermore common
  • KEKenya1 in 131◐
  • MWMalawi1 in 184
  • ZMZambia1 in 236

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

≈30K ●

across 9 countries

2 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
276 ●

198K records

Official registry-verified

1 in 1.1K ◐

Ecuador

Spellings & scripts●

MercyLatin · Swahili●367K records
เมอร์ซThai · Thai●4 records

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●

habitational name from places so named in Allier, Meuthe-etMoselle, and Yonne, derived from the Latin personal name Marcius, Martius, or Mercius + the locative suffix -acum.

Sources 1

  • Dictionary of American Family Names

Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

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

Where Mercy is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
KE Kenya#6220,43447K rec.——Mercy94
NG Nigeria#7769,82578K rec.——Mercy99
PH Philippines#57938,09937K rec.——Mercy63
EC Ecuador—15,503△92 rec.1 in 1.1K16KMercy22
US United States—12,59117K rec.1 in 26K13KMercy276
ZM Zambia#229,002175 rec.—2Mercy33
IN India—4,6963.4K rec.—10Mercy96
ZA South Africa—3,7573.9K rec.——Mercy47
GH Ghana#1193,4851.8K rec.——Mercy53
MW Malawi#52,26126 rec.——Mercy22
GB United Kingdom—2,1451.1K rec.—3Mercy89
BR Brazil—794—1 in 267K864——

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

Languages●

  • Swahili367K47%
  • English160K20%
  • Spanish93K12%
  • Akan83K11%
  • Hindi18K2%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
Swahili367,01947%
English159,72820%
Spanish93,01912%
Akan82,64911%
Hindi17,6902%

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◐

Mercy is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English given name243K records spelled Mercy19 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, United States, Ecuador, Philippines

    Languages: English, Danish, German

    Also written Mërçŷ, Mërċy, Mèrcy, Mërcy, Męřçý

  • Spanish given name115K records spelled Mercy22 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Philippines, Ecuador, Peru, United States

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French

    Also written Mërcÿ, Měŕçý, Mėrcy, Mërčÿ, Mërçŷ

  • Hindi given name24K records spelled Mercy9 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, Philippines, United States, Nigeria

    Languages: Hindi, Assamese, Urdu

    Also written Miris, මරිසි, මර්සි

  • Turkish given name746 records spelled Mercy6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, United States, Philippines, Türkiye

    Languages: Turkish, Azerbaijani

    Also written Merşi, Mèrçy, Mersi

69 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●

Mercy 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 French, from a Picard or Walloon form of Mercier.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In English, Relenting; forbearance to cause or allow harm to another.

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

  • In frm, mercy (relenting; forbearance to cause or allow harm to another)

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

  • In enm, alternative form of mercien

    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.

Over time●

0200400600190019502000441 · 2019

Show as table
Mercy in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1881–2025
Yearrecords
18819
18827
18835
18845
18866
18876
18885
188910
18916
18927
18935
18967
19007
19015
19027
19037
19049
19055
19075
19086
190910
191010
191112
191210
191311
191422
191514
191629
191725
191825
191929
192028
192127
192227
192325
192445
192535
192633
192743
192845
192951
193042
193130
193234
193328
193447
193537
193638
193741
193834
193937
194037
194141
194246
194338
194441
194541
194645
194740
194839
194929
195037
195144
195244
195352
195468
195555
195641
195751
195857
195945
196052
196133
196233
196342
196444
196532
196631
196730
196827
196947
197049
197151
197253
197356
197469
197570
197638
197752
197836
197957
198050
198149
198246
198340
198433
198545
198633
198740
198842
198943
199053
199150
199247
199352
199459
199569
199685
1997102
199872
199988
2000112
2001131
2002111
2003156
2004150
2005159
2006163
2007176
2008182
2009193
2010207
2011246
2012255
2013314
2014289
2015265
2016360
2017367
2018392
2019441
2020339
2021363
2022355
2023329
2024320
2025313

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 137 years between 1881–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

160017001800190020002100Mercy Lewis, b. 1675Mercy Otis Warren, b. 1728Mercy Williams, b. 1947Mercy Akide, b. 1975Mercy Aigbe, b. 1978Mercy Johnson, b. 1984Mercy Wanjiku Njoroge, b. 1986Mercy Cherono, b. 1991Mercy James, b. 2006

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 77 sources across 42 countries.

Official registers attesting Mercy
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
EC EcuadorINEC — civil registry names202416K#137
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202013K#2,101
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020670#36,002
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010575#38,484
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000526#39,378
BE BelgiumFamilienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register)2008365#4,378
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—314#3,430
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)2025313—
BE BelgiumStatbel — Noms de famille (family names)—312#5,437
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—307#6,504
ES SpainINE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—278#3,209
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—273#4,158

Reference works 6

  • 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)
  • jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 574 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Mercy?
We estimate roughly 30 thousand people bear Mercy (counting its spellings and scripts) across 9 countries in our records.
In which country does Mercy have the most bearers?
Mercy is most frequently recorded in Kenya, where it is most often spelled mercy.
How common is Mercy compared with other names?
In Kenya, Mercy is the 6th most common given name of 51,773 given names recorded there.
Is Mercy a male or female name?
Mercy 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 Mercy mean?
Recorded meaning: habitational name from places so named in Allier, Meuthe-etMoselle, and Yonne, derived from the Latin personal name Marcius, Martius, or Mercius + the locative suffix -acum.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/mercy

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, “Mercy” — the 6th most common given name in Kenya. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Mercy parses inside a full name →