Names of Cook Islands CK

Names in the Cook Islands are recorded in English and rar, with a given name followed by an inherited family name.

Written in English, rar.

Population
8.6K
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
52
BBuilt from 1 official register, 52 name forms in our corpus, 10 cited works.

At least one official register, 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.

How names work in Cook Islands

2 naming traditions are in use in Cook Islands, 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 Cook Islands

Scripts & spelling

Koettersurname●
Dacksurname●
Bortnersurname●
Marsterssurname●
Sissurname●
The best-attested names in Cook Islands, 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

  • Cook Islands Electoral Rolls (2022 General Election + 2024 Pa Enua)2022not a population count

    Cook Islands Statistics Office (Chief Electoral Officer). Counts: registered voters. given and surname. 4,810 forms. 2022. Licence: Open government data.

    What we know about this register

    131 electoral-roll PDFs (Rarotonga main+supp+additional rolls, Outer Islands main+supp, 2024 Pa Enua village rolls). 14,765 person records aggregated to 4,828 distinct given / 2,938 distinct surname with counts. Format 'SURNAME Given Middle, Residence, Occupation'; surname = leading ALL-CAPS token(s), given = first following token. Deletion (objection) lines excluded.

    Last verified 2026-07-02.

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 Cook Islands?
No — 2 are described on this page (Western Polynesian Outlier, British), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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