Sabah
loc · Malay · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Sabah is a name, most frequently recorded in Malaysia. It appears chiefly in Malay and Arabic, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Sabah (state in Malaysia): a state in eastern Malaysia located at the Northern part of the Borneo island with the main city Kota Kinabalu as its capital.
- MYMalaysia1 in 90◐
- KWKuwait1 in 1.1K
- BNBrunei1 in 8.1K
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- ≈755 ●
- Sources
- 184 ●
- 1 in 91K ◐
across 13 countries
85K records
Official registry-verified
Norway
Meaning & origin●
Sabah (state in Malaysia): a state in eastern Malaysia located at the Northern part of the Borneo island with the main city Kota Kinabalu as its capital.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world●
Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MY Malaysia | 1,340,469 | 474 rec. | — | — | Sabah | 20 |
| KW Kuwait | 1,057 | 671 rec. | — | — | Sabah | 66 |
| ID Indonesia | 561 | 44 rec. | — | — | Sabah | 30 |
| US United States | 374 | 8.1K rec. | 1 in 889K | 1.7K | — | 184 |
| CN China | 227 | 7 rec. | — | — | Sabah | 8 |
| ES Spain | 74 | 1.1K rec. | 1 in 676K | 1.8K | — | 41 |
| NO Norway | 60 | 86 rec. | 1 in 91K | 468 | — | 16 |
| AR Argentina | 56 | — | 1 in 812K | 56 | — | — |
| BR Brazil | 38 | — | 1 in 5.6M | 41 | — | — |
| FI Finland | 34△ | 12 rec. | 1 in 164K | 195 | — | 3 |
| TW Taiwan | 33 | 0 rec. | — | — | Sabah | 1 |
| BN Brunei | 29 | 0 rec. | — | — | Sabah | 1 |
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.
Languages●
- Malay1.3M65%
- Arabic1.1K1%
- Indonesian5261%
- Chinese2791%
- English2451%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Malay | 1,340,498 | 65% |
| Arabic | 1,097 | 1% |
| Indonesian | 526 | 1% |
| Chinese | 279 | 1% |
| English | 245 | 1% |
Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.
Other recorded senses●
Sabah 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.
‘Morning’.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In German, weibl. Vom. arabischer Herkunft (arab. sabäh »Morgen« zu arab. sabaha »am Morgen geschehen« oder »Morgen werden«).
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
morning; dawn; beautiful
as a nameMuslim baby names (our 2,000 meaningful and beautiful names for boys and girls) English-Urdu with Roman
In Serbo-Croatian, Sabah (state in Malaysia)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In btd, wet ricefield, rice paddy
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
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●
Show as table
| Year | records |
|---|---|
| 1968 | 5 |
| 1974 | 9 |
| 1975 | 6 |
| 1977 | 5 |
| 1980 | 9 |
| 1981 | 5 |
| 1983 | 14 |
| 1984 | 9 |
| 1985 | 8 |
| 1987 | 8 |
| 1988 | 17 |
| 1989 | 12 |
| 1990 | 15 |
| 1991 | 14 |
| 1992 | 16 |
| 1993 | 13 |
| 1994 | 16 |
| 1995 | 12 |
| 1996 | 22 |
| 1997 | 17 |
| 1998 | 15 |
| 1999 | 18 |
| 2000 | 18 |
| 2001 | 10 |
| 2002 | 14 |
| 2003 | 9 |
| 2004 | 16 |
| 2005 | 11 |
| 2006 | 11 |
| 2007 | 10 |
| 2008 | 7 |
| 2009 | 11 |
| 2010 | 13 |
| 2011 | 10 |
| 2012 | 10 |
| 2013 | 12 |
| 2014 | 7 |
| 2015 | 9 |
| 2016 | 13 |
| 2017 | 9 |
| 2018 | 11 |
| 2019 | 10 |
| 2020 | 9 |
| 2021 | 7 |
| 2022 | 6 |
| 2023 | 8 |
| 2024 | 6 |
| 2025 | 7 |
US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 48 years between 1968–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.
Notable people with this name●
- Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabahb. 1929KWemir of Kuwait (1929–2020)
- Sabah Fakhrib. 1933SYSyrian singer (1934–2021)
- Gérard Sabahb. 1948FRFrench engineer
- Sabah Abdul-Jalilb. 1951IQassociation football player (2000-)
- Sabah Abouessalamb. 1959MAMoroccan and French urban sociologist
- Sabah Naimb. 1967EGEgyptian multimedia artist
- Avi Sabahb. 1977ILIsraeli artist and lecturer (born 1977)
- Sabah Sanhourib. 1990SDSudanese fiction writer
- Alban Sabahb. 1992DEGerman footballer
- Sabah Seghirb. 2000FRFrench and Moroccan footballer
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 74 sources across 41 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024) | 2024 | 3.3K | #3,230 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 1.8K | #1,115 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 1.8K | #1,915 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 1.7K | #6,450 |
| ES Spain | INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 1.6K | #1,059 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 772 | #6,450 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 620 | #38,417 |
| SE Sweden | SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023) | 2020 | 521 | — |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 468 | #2,638 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 374 | #54,990 |
| AL Albania | INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts) | — | 244 | #1,606 |
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017) | — | 219 | #5,178 |
Reference works 4
- 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 · 268 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Sabah?
- We estimate roughly 755 people bear Sabah (counting its spellings and scripts) across 13 countries in our records.
- In which country does Sabah have the most bearers?
- Sabah is most frequently recorded in Malaysia, where it is most often spelled sabah.
- What does the name Sabah mean?
- Recorded meaning: Sabah (state in Malaysia): a state in eastern Malaysia located at the Northern part of the Borneo island with the main city Kota Kinabalu as its capital.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/sabahThe 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
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, “Sabah”. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.