Sankara

given name · Hindi · Latin script

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

Sankara is a given name, most frequently recorded in India, where it is the 9th most common given name. It appears chiefly in Hindi and English, written in the Latin script.

rarermore common
  • INIndia1 in 376
  • MYMalaysia1 in 17K
  • AUAustralia1 in 59K

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

≈1.7K

across 7 countries

#273

of 16M given names

6

recorded for this name

Sources
269

2.8M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 13K

Guyana

Spellings & scripts

ShankarLatin · Hindi5.5M records
শঙ্করBengali · Bangla3.5K records
ชานิการThai · Thai5 records
ᲨანკარGeorgian · Georgian1 records
СанкараCyrillic · Serbian0 records
శంకరTelugu · Telugu0 records

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Shankar in IN India, US United States, MY Malaysia and 21 more.

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

No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.

Where in the world

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

Where Sankara is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
IN India#98,652,6912.7M rec.1.1MShankar257
MY Malaysia3,7913.4K rec.Shankar41
GB United Kingdom2,3552.5K rec.listedShankar86
PK Pakistan2,15277 rec.Shankar27
AU Australia1,9753.8K rec.1Shankar99
US United States1,35042K rec.1 in 246K3.3KShankar269
BD Bangladesh#937790455 rec.Shankar40
CA Canada6901.5K rec.Shankar65
ID Indonesia447718 rec.Shankar33
NP Nepal4351.3K rec.4Shankar61
SG Singapore327561 rec.Shankar30
DE Germany314537 rec.1Shankar56

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

Languages

  • Hindi82K46%
  • English28K16%
  • Assamese25K14%
  • Telugu25K14%
  • 5.4K3%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
Hindi81,88646%
English28,07016%
Assamese24,86414%
Telugu24,86314%
5,3563%

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

Sankara is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate given name8.7K records spelled Sankara6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, United States

    Also written Śaṅkara, Saṅkara, Śaṇkara, Šankara, Śankara

  • Sinhala given name646 records spelled Sankara2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, United States

    Also written Śaṅkara

  • Malay given name109 records spelled Sankara2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Malaysia, India

    Also written Adi Shankara

35 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

Sankara is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Latvian, apdzīvota vieta Lielbritānijā (Sanquhar), Skotijā, Nitas kreisajā krastā

    as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)

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.

Notable people with this name

1940196019802000Thomas Sankara, b. 1949Mariam Sankara, b. 1953Bénéwendé Stanislas Sankara, b. 1959Odile Sankara, b. 1963Mamadou Sankara, 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 26 sources across 17 countries.

Official registers attesting Sankara
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
IN IndiaIndia Names Dataset — Andhra Pradesh Electoral Rolls (Internet Archive)25K#232
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls2K#1,951
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls326#12,583
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020115#47,514
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)25#21,647
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202022#47,514
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)20#30,749
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)10#36,050
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)20249#65,843
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)20208
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)8#134,434
IN Indianaampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls)19718

Reference works 3

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

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Sankara?
We estimate roughly 1.7 thousand people bear Sankara (counting its spellings and scripts) across 7 countries in our records.
In which country does Sankara have the most bearers?
Sankara is most frequently recorded in India, where it is most often spelled shankar.
How common is Sankara compared with other names?
In India, Sankara is the 9th most common given name of 4,777,337 given names recorded there.
Is Sankara a male or female name?
Sankara 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.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/sankara

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, “Sankara” — the 9th most common given name in India. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Sankara parses inside a full name →