Names of Benin BJ

The names that most distinguish Benin from the rest of the world are Lesage, Fredrik and Andersson; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Benin are Fredrik and Lesage.

Written in French, Yoruba, fon.

Population
13M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
2.1K
BBuilt from 1 official register, 2,125 name forms in our corpus, 17 cited works.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

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

How names work in Benin

3 naming traditions are in use in Benin, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.

The most common names in Benin

Characteristic of Benin

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Benin 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.

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

Scripts & spelling

Längiven name●
Fredrikgiven name●
Lesagesurname●
Anderssonsurname●
Mabesurname●
The best-attested names in Benin, 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.

The Latin alphabet here is not the ASCII one. Stripping diacritics merges names that are not the same name and changes how they are pronounced, and a record that has been ASCII-folded has lost information no amount of guessing recovers.

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

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

Is there one naming system in Benin?
No — 3 are described on this page (Yoruba, Fon, French), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Benin”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/BJ (data snapshot 2026-09-12).