Names of Canada CA

The names that most distinguish Canada from the rest of the world are Robert, Steven and John; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Canada are John and Smith.

Written in English, French.

Population
38M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
225K
BBuilt from 1 official register, 1 sub-national, 225,305 name forms in our corpus.

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

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

How names work in Canada

2 naming traditions are in use in Canada, 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 Canada

Characteristic of Canada

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Johngiven name●
Hamiltonsurname●
Newtonsurname●
Michaelgiven name●
Sangiven name●
The best-attested names in Canada, 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

  • Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender2024not a population count

    Government of Alberta, Service Alberta. Counts: newborns. given. 7,623 forms. 2021–2024. Licence: Open Government Licence - Alberta.

    What we know about this register

    Alberta vital statistics baby name frequency data 1980-2024, available as XLSX. Direct Excel download returns 403 from outside Alberta. Fetched via Firecrawl which bypasses the block and converts Excel to HTML. Columns: Rank, Name, Number, Sex (Boy/Girl), Year.

    Last verified 2026-05-10.

Sub-national registers

1 register for Canada publishes regional lists only (Statistics Canada — First names at birth by sex at birth (Table 17-10-0147-01)). A regional list is not a national one, and summing regions would be an aggregate the publisher never made, so no figure on this page comes from them.

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 Canada?
No — 2 are described on this page (British, French), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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