Names of Bulgaria BG

NSI — most common surnames (2018) records Иванова as the commonest surname in Bulgaria; the names that most distinguish Bulgaria from the rest of the world are Dimitar, Георги and Георгиев.

Written in Bulgarian.

Population
7M
Official registers
6
Name forms recorded
55K
ABuilt from 6 official registers (2023), 55,001 name forms in our corpus, 2 cited works.

Official registers for given names and surnames, plus a written account of the naming system.

The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of Bulgaria are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Bulgaria included.

How names work in Bulgaria

Names in Bulgaria follow one naming tradition. Its structure, its given-name and surname stock, how to address someone and what trips software up are set out on its own page.

The most common names in Bulgaria

Counts children born in the year · authority tier 1
NSI — popular newborn given names (annual press release), 2023 — 11 given names counted over children born that year, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Виктория58929
2Мария5375
3София480—
4Никол442—
5Рая397—
6Александра329—
7Габриела329—
8Йоана302—
9Елена28811
10Дария283—
14Симона244—

Where the two lists disagree

12 of NSI — popular newborn given names (annual press release)'s top 13 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

NSI — popular newborn given names (annual press release) 2023Across all recordsалександър: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. александърnot rankedгеорги: 2 → 12. георги1калоян: 3 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country3. калоянnot rankedмартин: 4 → 22 · ranks lower across all records4. мартин22теодор: 5 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country5. теодорnot rankedникола: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. николаnot rankedиван: 7 → 2 · ranks higher across all records7. иван2борис: 8 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country8. борисnot rankedдимитър: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. димитърnot rankedвиктор: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. викторnot rankedданиел: 11 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country11. даниелnot rankedниколай: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. николайnot rankedкристиян: 15 → 82 · ranks lower across all records15. кристиян82
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
NSI — popular newborn given names (annual press release), 2023 on the left; every record we hold for Bulgaria on the right. A dashed line means the name is not in our top ranks for this country at all.

The register counts one population in one year — everyone it enumerates, once. Our corpus counts records: historical registers going back decades, the diaspora, business and place records, and several generations of births. A name that was common two generations ago outranks a name common today; a name whose spelling scatters across sources (diacritics dropped, transliterated differently) loses ground, because only its dominant spelling is ranked.

Characteristic of Bulgaria

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Bulgaria holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.

DimitarГеоргиИванХристоИванкаКрасимирИорданТодорНиколаиСтоянАтанасИваилоПламенИорданкаPetarРосицаПенкаДесиславаПетяГерганаРумянаДаниелаМартинМариикаВасилМиленаЕмилияАнгелМарияРадкаВалентинAleksandarВиолетаСтефанМаргаритаСилвияВикторияTeodoraЕленаНадеждаТаняRumenNikolaVeselinPetkoBorislavKaloyanTsvetanEmilVentsislavMilenElenaKostadinAyşeAsenRadoslavMitkoSvetoslavIliyanVioleta
Sized by how much of the difference between Bulgaria's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Over time

МарияИванкаЕленаЙорданкаДаниела20182023113,010
NSI — most common given names in the population (annual press release), 2018–2023 (6 years). The line is that register's own figure for each year — not a total across registers, which would count the same people twice. The publisher labels this series “flow”.

Up to five names at a time.

Scripts & spelling

Names in Bulgaria are written in Cyrillic (74%) and Latin (25%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

Георгиgiven name●Georges
Иванgiven name●Ivan
Николаиgiven name●Nicolas
Dimitargiven name●
Марияgiven name●Maria
The best-attested names in Bulgaria, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

Countries whose names look alike

Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.

Registers & sources

Official registers

  • NSI — popular newborn given names (annual press release)2023headline (given)

    National Statistical Institute (NSI), Bulgaria. Counts: newborns. given. 13 forms. 2018–2023. Licence: Free (publication).

    What we know about this register

    Most-popular given names among newborns (current-year column), top ~10-13 per sex with rank and count, from the NSI annual "Имената в България" press-release PDFs. Parsed by scripts/fetch_bg_nsi_names.py from NamesYYYYp.pdf for 2018-2023. Verified 2023 girls: Виктория(1)=589, Мария(2)=537, София(3)=480. 147 rows, rank populated. data_note=newborns. Adds 2018-2023 alongside the old bg-nsi-newborns / bg-nsi-names newborn stubs.

    Last verified 2026-06-27.

  • NSI — most common surnames2018headline (surnames)

    National Statistical Institute (NSI), Bulgaria. Counts: residents. surname. 10 forms. 2018.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 20 rows, name_types=['surname'], evidence=[]. source note: total_population_top10

    Last verified 2026-06-05.

  • NSI — newborn names (press release)2018

    National Statistical Institute (NSI), Bulgaria. Counts: newborns. given. 10 forms. 2008–2018.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 60 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=[]. source note: newborn_top10

    Last verified 2026-06-05.

  • NSI — most common given names in the population (annual press release)2023

    National Statistical Institute (NSI), Bulgaria. Counts: not recorded. given. 20 forms. 2018–2023. Licence: Free (publication).

    What we know about this register

    Top-20 most common male + female given names in the living Bulgarian population ("най-разпространени имена към края на годината"), with counts, from the NSI annual "Имената в България" press-release PDFs. Parsed with pdftotext -layout + regex by scripts/fetch_bg_nsi_names.py from NamesYYYYp.pdf for 2018-2023 (URL pattern confirmed live this session; 2024/2025 use a different filename, not yet located). Verified 2023: ГЕОРГИ=143185, ИВАН=130551, ДИМИТЪР=104856; МАРИЯ=102050, ИВАНКА=48639, ЕЛЕНА=47918. 233 rows. data_note=population_stock. A few 2020/2021 male entries dropped where the PDF graphical layout displaced the count with a column total (count cap rejects implausible values). Supersedes the old 80-row 2016/2018 bg-nsi-population stub by adding 2018-2023. ADDITIONALLY CHECKED 2026-08-06: per the standing hint that GRAO (grao.bg), not NSI, is Bulgaria's actual civil-registry/EGN authority, crawled grao.bg directly (HTTP 200). Its public menu is minimal: За нас, ЕСГРАОН, Нормативни актове, Таблици, НБД "Население" (access conditions/renewal/digital-certificate pages — an AUTHENTICATED B2G data-exchange service for other institutions, not a public tool), Полезна информация, Контакти. The only outbound functional links are to regna.grao.bg (title: "Регистрация за гласуване по настоящ адрес" — a login-gated action to register to vote at one's current address, not a name-search box) and grao.bg/elections. No per-name query form, no statistics-by-name page, no API. Re-checked nsi.bg for the same: root redirects (301) and no name/onomastics search surfaced in site navigation — consistent with NSI publishing name statistics only via the press-release PDFs already catalogued in this file. No live BG per-name oracle exists at either agency.

    Last verified 2026-06-27.

  • NSI — most common given names (population)2018

    National Statistical Institute (NSI), Bulgaria. Counts: residents. given. 20 forms. 2016–2018.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 80 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=[]. source note: total_population_top20

    Last verified 2026-06-05.

  • NSI — most common surnames (annual press release)2022

    National Statistical Institute (NSI), Bulgaria. Counts: not recorded. surname. 16 forms. 2018–2022. Licence: Free (publication).

    What we know about this register

    Top-16 most common male + female surnames with counts per year, from the NSI 'Имената в България' press-release PDFs. EXPANDED 2026-07-30 from 2022-only to 2018-2022 (112 rows across 5 years; 80 of them newly written to normalized/BG/bg-nsi-surnames-annual.parquet by scripts/parse_bg_nsi_surname_clouds.py, with 2022 left to fetch_bg_nsi_names.py which already owned it, so it is not double-counted). The earlier verdict that 2018/2019 'render as scattered graphics and are skipped' was not right: the text layer is present and extractable in every year. What defeats a line-based parser is the LAYOUT — 2016-2021 draw the surnames as a WORD CLOUD positioning each name and its count spatially, so content order interleaves them unrecoverably (2019 emits 'Димитрова / Димитров / 103 902' — two names, one count, while the geometry shows Димитрова 103,902 and Димитров 100,189). 2022 switched to a clean two-column table, which is the only reason 2022 parsed. The new parser pairs by GEOMETRY with pdfplumber word boxes, accepting both layouts (count BELOW the name for clouds, count RIGHT of it on the same baseline for tables) via mutual-nearest matching so two names cannot claim one count. Validated by reproducing 2022 exactly against the independent clean-table extraction — ИВАНОВА 131,184, ИВАНОВ 125,111, ГЕОРГИЕВА 101,357, all 32 rows. Two further gotchas are handled: the surname page is found by CONTENT (several -ов/-ев/-ова/-ева tokens plus several counts >= 10,000) and never by its heading, because 2021 draws 'Най-популярните' and 'ФАМИЛИИ' as overlapping text objects so the words interleave as 'Най Ф -п А оп М ул И яр Л н И ит И е' and no contiguous 'ФАМИЛ' string exists on the page; and space-grouped thousands are rebuilt from adjacent digit runs on one baseline. 2016, 2017 and 2023 carry NO surname section at all (confirmed: zero surname-morphology pages), so the series is 2018-2022 and complete. Distinct-surname coverage is unchanged at 52 because a top-20 list repeats the same names every year; what is new is the annual time series. Supersedes the old 20-row 2018 bg-nsi-surnames stub, which used mixed case where these use uppercase. data_note population_stock.

    Last verified 2026-07-30.

Cited works

Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.

About this data

Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.

Data snapshot: 2026-09-12.

Questions

What is the most common given name in Bulgaria?
Александър, according to NSI — popular newborn given names (annual press release) (2023), with 828 bearers recorded among boys.
What is the most common surname in Bulgaria?
Иванова, according to NSI — most common surnames (2018), with 141,183 bearers recorded among girls.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Bulgaria?
Because they count different people. NSI — popular newborn given names (annual press release) (2023) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Александър. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Георги. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Bulgaria”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/BG (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from NSI — popular newborn given names (annual press release); NSI — most common surnames.