Michelle

given name · English · Latin script

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

Michelle is a given name, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country, where it is the 34th most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and , written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Female form of Michel; Heb.

rarermore common
  • AUAustralia1 in 211◐
  • GBUnited Kingdom1 in 299
  • NZNew Zealand1 in 304

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

≈962K ●

across 9 countries

#122 ●

of 16M given names

4 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
606 ●

12M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 440 ◐

United States

Spellings & scripts●

MichelleLatin · English●12M records
미쉘Hangul · Korean●7 records
มเชลลThai · Thai●1 records
מישעלHebrew · Yiddish●0 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●

Female form of Michel; Heb. 'Who is like God?'.

Sources 1

  • Dictionnaire généalogique des prénoms

Attested across 18 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

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

Where Michelle is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#34755,8209.5M rec.1 in 440756KMichelle606
GB United Kingdom#47691,949605K rec.——Michelle277
AU Australia#26549,784381K rec.—88Michelle313
PH Philippines#22388,714269K rec.——Michelle190
CA Canada#33261,977241K rec.—16Michelle271
FR France#206122,270176K rec.1 in 555122KMichelle358
MX Mexico#329116,68973K rec.——Michelle223
DE Germany#24298,04590K rec.——Michelle226
AR Argentina#62981,51450K rec.—136Michelle104
IT Italy#14363,63854K rec.—207Michelle154
BR Brazil#51848,598102K rec.1 in 4.4K49KMichelle213
CL Chile#28943,0038.6K rec.——Michelle128

Roughly 756K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 440). 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●

  • English12M70%
  • 1.2M7%
  • Spanish876K5%
  • Portuguese875K5%
  • French721K4%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English12,401,61670%
1,182,6677%
Spanish876,0055%
Portuguese875,4725%
French721,2964%

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◐

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

  • a separate given name1.3M records spelled Michelle5 spellings in the group

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

    Also written Michel-Le, Michélle, Michèlle, Michellè

  • Hindi given name75K records spelled Michelle11 spellings in the group

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

    Languages: Hindi, Urdu, Sinhala

    Also written Michel-Le, Michélle, Michellé, Michèlle, Míchelle

  • Indonesian given name68K records spelled Michelle5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Indonesia, United States, Philippines, Malaysia

    Languages: Indonesian, Malay, Malagasy

    Also written 'Michelle, Michelle'

  • Hungarian given name24K records spelled Michelle7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Hungary, Finland, United States, United Kingdom

    Languages: Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian

    Also written Michèlle, Mîchelle, Mïçhëllë

84 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●

Michelle is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, French feminine form of Michael; popular among modern Irish parents.

    as a nameIrish first names

  • In English, French feminine of Michael; "who is like God?"

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

  • A French feminine version of Michael which seems popular amongst modern Irish parents. Michele is an alternative 86 Monica spelling. Michaela, another feminine form of Michael, also occurs.

    as a nameIrish first names

  • French feminine form of Michel, the French form of }Michael. This name is now also used extensively in the Englishspeaking world (partly influenced by a Beatles song with this name as its title). Short forms: Chelle, Shell. 173

    as a nameA concise dictionary of first names

  • In French, from the female personal name Michelle, feminine form of Michel, French form of Michael.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

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●

010K20K30K40K19201940196019802000202034K · 1969

Show as table
Michelle in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1915–2025
Yearrecords
19155
19185
19197
19209
19229
19236
192411
192514
192611
192712
192810
192915
193013
193112
193210
193328
193424
193527
193629
193736
193855
193959
194092
1941133
1942233
1943370
1944405
1945499
1946755
1947914
19481,044
19491,248
19501,633
19512,133
19522,881
19533,631
19544,432
19554,526
19565,327
19575,982
19587,458
19598,776
19609,893
196112,741
196213,353
196314,383
196416,180
196516,215
196627,159
196730,827
196833,223
196934,319
197034,047
197133,160
197229,285
197326,935
197425,826
197522,665
197619,550
197719,540
197818,856
197919,266
198019,119
198117,781
198217,765
198316,838
198415,499
198513,973
198613,303
198713,034
198813,339
198913,376
199013,425
199112,213
199211,512
199310,193
19948,639
19957,392
19966,598
19975,695
19985,562
19995,303
20005,545
20015,033
20024,950
20034,873
20044,720
20054,312
20064,090
20073,596
20083,343
20093,078
20102,510
20112,180
20121,935
20131,892
20141,751
20151,706
20161,562
20171,429
20181,249
20191,144
2020923
2021799
2022827
2023766
2024775
2025661

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 108 years between 1915–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

1960197019801990Michelle Yeoh, b. 1962Michelle Obama, b. 1964Michelle Monaghan, b. 1976Jessica Chastain, b. 1977Ginnifer Goodwin, b. 1978Michelle Rodriguez, b. 1978Michelle Williams, b. 1980Ashley Tisdale, b. 1985Amanda Seyfried, b. 1985Tori Black, b. 1988

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 129 sources across 72 countries.

Official registers attesting Michelle
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020756K#42
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024)2024122K#1,090
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)202249K—
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—48K#578
BR BrazilIBGE — Nomes (census name API)—33K#1,047
EC EcuadorINEC — civil registry names202414K#147
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—8.6K#455
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—7.3K#97
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—7.1K#503
AT AustriaStatistik Austria — STATatlas Vornamen WFS (per-name time series 1984–2024)20246.6K#361
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)20204.1K—
CR Costa RicaTSE — electoral roll (padrón) names—3.8K#196

Reference works 5

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • 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 · 1,861 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Michelle?
We estimate roughly 962 thousand people bear Michelle (counting its spellings and scripts) across 9 countries in our records.
In which country does Michelle have the most bearers?
We estimate about 756 thousand people bear Michelle in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled michelle.
How common is Michelle compared with other names?
In the United States, Michelle is the 34th most common given name of 3,122,706 given names recorded there.
Is Michelle a male or female name?
Michelle 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 Michelle mean?
Recorded meaning: Female form of Michel; Heb.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/michelle

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, “Michelle” — the 34th most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Michelle parses inside a full name →