Poul

given name · Danish · Latin script

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

Poul is a given name, with more bearers in Denmark than in any other country, where it is the 49th most common given name. It appears chiefly in Danish and English, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: From Old French Paul, brought to England by the Normans, itself from Latin Paulus.

rarermore common
  • DKDenmark1 in 331◐
  • PEPeru1 in 183K
  • USUnited States1 in 1M

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

≈19K ●

across 8 countries

Sources
157 ●

10K records

Official registry-verified

1 in 331 ◐

Denmark

Meaning & origin●

Derivation of Poul: each step is the form the one above it came from.
Poul
  1. Old FrenchPaul●
  2. LatinPaulus●

From Old French Paul, brought to England by the Normans, itself from Latin Paulus.

Sources 3

Attested across 21 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

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

Where Poul is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
DK Denmark#4917,757△5.2K rec.1 in 33118KPoul157
PE Peru—1,2311.1K rec.——Poul31
PH Philippines—525184 rec.——Poul17
SE Sweden—495△67 rec.1 in 21K495Poul28
NG Nigeria—48735 rec.——Poul10
ES Spain—444541 rec.——Poul19
NO Norway—42784 rec.—306Poul24
US United States—3241.3K rec.1 in 1M324Poul117
MX Mexico—251216 rec.——Poul23
GL Greenland#272422 rec.—181Poul10
GB United Kingdom—201131 rec.——Poul45
IN India—19297 rec.—115Poul19

Roughly 18K people in Denmark bear this name (about 1 in 331). 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●

  • Danish100K81%
  • English4.3K3%
  • Hindi3.7K3%
  • Spanish3.1K3%
  • 1.8K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
Danish99,74581%
English4,2763%
Hindi3,6663%
Spanish3,0843%
1,7931%

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◐

Poul is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Hindi given name9.5K records spelled Poul7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, United States, Philippines, Kenya

    Languages: Hindi, Assamese, Urdu

    Also written পাউল, Paulu

  • Czech given name2.5K records spelled Poul3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Czechia, Slovakia

    Languages: Czech, Slovak

    Also written Pôűĺ

57 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●

Poul 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 enm, a male given name from Old French

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

  • In Haitian Creole, chicken

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

  • In Luxembourgish, stake

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

  • In Breton, collier de jonc

    as a wordDeshayes, Dictionnaire étymologique du breton (2003)

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●

0102030401920194019601980200038 · 1993

Show as table
Poul in naampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls), India, 1918–2015
Yearrecords
19182
19211
19232
19272
19281
19291
19301
19311
19322
19331
19343
19352
19361
19371
19382
19395
19403
19412
19422
19432
19443
19455
19466
19475
19484
19498
195010
19517
19525
195312
19547
19556
19569
19576
195811
195913
196019
19617
196214
196318
196416
196522
196619
196716
196818
196925
197019
197119
197219
19738
197425
197531
197621
197724
197825
197919
198022
198121
198232
198324
198414
198522
198628
198725
198817
198927
199024
199128
199219
199338
199434
199524
19967
199712
19983
20102
20114
20124
201312
20141
20157

IN naampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls) — 81 years between 1918–2015. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

1700180019002000Paul Egede, b. 1708Poul Martin Møller, b. 1794Poul Nielsen, b. 1891Poul Henningsen, b. 1894Poul Hartling, b. 1914Poul Anderson, b. 1926Poul Schlüter, b. 1929Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, b. 1943Poul Ruders, b. 1949Poul Berg, b. 1970

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 47 sources across 24 countries.

Official registers attesting Poul
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—18K#39
IN IndiaIndia Names Dataset — Andhra Pradesh Electoral Rolls (Internet Archive)—897#3,500
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls—730#1,714
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—495#2,795
CZ CzechiaMVČR — living population register 2017—443#3,480
CZ CzechiaKdeJsme.cz — četnost jmen a příjmení (MVČR population register front-end)—443#3,195
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)1999414—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)2000399—
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020324#27,915
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—306#3,503
GL GreenlandStatistics Greenland — First names (NAXT5)2011224—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)2020223—

Reference works 4

  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname 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 · 304 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Poul?
We estimate roughly 19 thousand people bear Poul (counting its spellings and scripts) across 8 countries in our records.
In which country does Poul have the most bearers?
We estimate about 18 thousand people bear Poul in Denmark, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled poul.
How common is Poul compared with other names?
In Denmark, Poul is the 49th most common given name of 31,396 given names recorded there.
Is Poul a male or female name?
Poul is a male 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 Poul mean?
Recorded meaning: From Old French Paul, brought to England by the Normans, itself from Latin Paulus.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/poul

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, “Poul” — the 49th most common given name in Denmark. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Poul parses inside a full name →