Shyam

given name · Hindi · Latin script

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

Shyam is a given name, most frequently recorded in India, where it is the 94th most common given name. It appears chiefly in Hindi and , written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Sanskrit: ‘black’, ‘dark’, ‘beautiful’, a byname of Krishna.

rarermore common
  • INIndia1 in 1.1K◐
  • USUnited States1 in 3K
  • MYMalaysia1 in 11K

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

≈133K ●

across 11 countries

#855 ●

of 16M given names

3 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
262 ●

1.2M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 905 ◐

Sweden

Spellings & scripts●

ShyamLatin · Hindi●2.4M records
শ্যামBengali · Bangla●601 records
ชยามThai · Thai●13 records

4 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Sham in MY Malaysia, SY Syria, PK Pakistan and 2 more, Syam in AE United Arab Emirates, SA Saudi Arabia and Sam in BD Bangladesh.

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●

Sanskrit: ‘black’, ‘dark’, ‘beautiful’, a byname of Krishna. Shyama ° Feminine form of sHyam, also meaning ‘night’; a byname of Durga, the APPENDIX: . INDIAN APPENDIX: INDIAN wife of Shiva. It is also the name of a Jain goddess.

Sources 1

  • A concise dictionary of first names

Where in the world●

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

Where Shyam is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
IN India#943,057,7011.1M rec.—6.8KShyam243
US United States—111,555△28K rec.1 in 3K112KShyam262
SE Sweden—11,277△75 rec.1 in 90511KShyam14
FR France—6,555△1 rec.1 in 10K6.6K—1
MY Malaysia#8805,6735.6K rec.——Sham35
GB United Kingdom—4,1312.7K rec.—3Shyam99
AU Australia—1,9452.1K rec.—103Shyam103
SY Syria—1,5832.1K rec.——Sham12
BD Bangladesh#7871,0031.4K rec.——Sam44
CA Canada—959993 rec.—12Shyam68
PK Pakistan—837255 rec.—listedSham24
FI Finland—708△11 rec.1 in 7.9K972Shyam5

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

Languages●

  • Hindi2.4M66%
  • 949K26%
  • English71K2%
  • Bangla34K1%
  • Indonesian25K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
Hindi2,361,65966%
949,21026%
English71,0122%
Bangla33,7231%
Indonesian24,9131%

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◐

Shyam is also recorded as 5 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate given name1.1M records spelled Shyam2 spellings in the group

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

    Also written Shyām

  • Arabic given name15K records spelled Shyam7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar

    Languages: Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew

    Also written שיאם, Shiam, Shÿâm, Shyâm

  • Russian given name3.1K records spelled Shyam18 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia

    Languages: Russian, Croatian, Czech

    Also written Шьям, Шям, Şhyam, Šhýäm

  • Polish given name619 records spelled Shyam3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Poland, India, United States, United Kingdom

    Also written Sĥýäm, Śȟÿäm

  • Italian given name375 records spelled Shyam2 spellings in the group

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

    Also written Shyām

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●

Shyam is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, from Sanskrit śyāma, 'dark; black; dusky'

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

  • In English, A male given name of Indian usage.

    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●

05K10K15K19001920194019601980200013K · 1984

Show as table
Shyam in naampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls), India, 1899–2017
Yearrecords
189917
19011
19032
19052
19071
19081
19091
19101
19121
19135
19147
19156
191614
191721
191823
191934
1920119
192131
192276
192397
1924123
1925110
1926120
1927167
1928220
1929292
1930198
1931321
1932579
1933460
1934811
1935659
1936737
1937993
19381,050
19391,427
19401,356
19411,507
19422,151
19431,861
19442,709
19452,304
19462,700
19473,213
19483,080
19493,561
19503,554
19513,864
19525,001
19533,535
19545,310
19554,353
19565,001
19576,095
19586,171
19597,678
19606,275
19616,395
19628,771
19637,403
19648,629
19658,004
19668,801
19679,628
19688,414
19699,128
19709,762
19718,941
197210,500
19739,938
19749,460
19759,548
197610,834
19779,421
19789,634
19799,268
19807,898
19819,814
198212,312
198312,055
198412,521
198511,531
19869,556
198711,395
198810,263
19899,665
19909,865
199110,686
199211,104
199311,577
19949,369
19958,361
19964,585
19974,468
19983,211
1999232
200012
20019
20025
20032
20042
20051
20061
200713
20081,252
200913
2010642
2011314
2012188
2013101
20141,990
2015454
20163
20173

IN naampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls) — 114 years between 1899–2017. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

1850190019502000Shyam Sundar Chakravarthy, b. 1869Shyam Nandan Prasad Mishra, b. 1920Shyam Benegal, b. 1934Shyam Bihari Misra, b. 1938Shyam Sunder, b. 1944Shyam Saran, b. 1946Shyam Manav, b. 1951Shyam Ramsay, b. 1952Shyam Selvadurai, b. 1965

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 44 sources across 24 countries.

Official registers attesting Shyam
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
IN IndiaIndia Names Dataset — Andhra Pradesh Electoral Rolls (Internet Archive)—23K#250
IN Indianaampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls)198413K—
IN Indianaampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls)198212K—
IN Indianaampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls)198312K—
IN Indianaampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls)199312K—
IN Indianaampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls)198512K—
IN Indianaampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls)198711K—
IN Indianaampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls)199211K—
IN Indianaampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls)197611K—
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls—8.7K#140
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls—6.8K#1,273
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex20202.3K#6,794

Reference works 4

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

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Shyam?
We estimate roughly 133 thousand people bear Shyam (counting its spellings and scripts) across 11 countries in our records.
In which country does Shyam have the most bearers?
Shyam is most frequently recorded in India, where it is most often spelled shyam.
Where is Shyam most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Shyam is densest in Sweden — about 1 in 905 people — even though India holds more of our records for it.
How common is Shyam compared with other names?
In India, Shyam is the 94th most common given name of 4,777,337 given names recorded there.
Is Shyam a male or female name?
Shyam is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
What does the name Shyam mean?
Recorded meaning: Sanskrit: ‘black’, ‘dark’, ‘beautiful’, a byname of Krishna.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/shyam

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, “Shyam” — the 94th most common given name in India. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Shyam parses inside a full name →