Names of Colombia CO
RNEC — Nombres más registrados (newborn name statistics) records Antonella as the commonest given name in Colombia and Rodríguez as the commonest surname; the names that most distinguish Colombia from the rest of the world are Maria, Paola and Andres.
Written in Spanish.
- Population
- 49M
- Official registers
- 3
- Name forms recorded
- 81K
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 Colombia
Names in Colombia 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 Colombia
| # | Name | Bearers recorded | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Antonella | 4.5K | — |
| 2 | Luciana | 2.9K | — |
| 3 | Isabella | 2.9K | — |
| 4 | Celeste | 2.2K | — |
| 5 | Salomé | 1.9K | — |
| 6 | Gabriela | 1.9K | — |
| 7 | Victoria | 1.8K | — |
| 8 | Mariana | 1.5K | 97 |
| 9 | Samantha | 1.5K | — |
Where the two lists disagree
9 of RNEC — Nombres más registrados (newborn name statistics)'s top 9 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.
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 Colombia
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Colombia 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.
Scripts & spelling
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
Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil (RNEC). Counts: not recorded. given and surname. 20 forms. 2016–2024. Licence: Free (official press release).
What we know about this register
RNEC publishes annual press releases each December with top newborn names (simple and compound, separated by sex). Years with full counts normalized: 2016 top-20, 2017 top-10, 2019 top-10, 2024 top-9. 2018 cumulative-only, 2021 rank-only, 2022 no ranked list published. Simple names only (compound names excluded for cross-source comparability). 2019 also includes top-10 surnames by birth registrations.
Last verified 2026-05-12.
- Colombia — Official candidate/public-employee name corpus (datos.gov.co)not a population count
datos.gov.co (Colombia national open-data portal). Counts: election candidates. given and surname. 3,067 forms. Licence: Open government data.
What we know about this register
Full names from official candidate (INFOCANDIDATOS) / public-employee registries via Socrata API, aggregated to given+surname frequency. Name corpus, not a population frequency table. ~6.6K name rows.
Last verified 2026-07-02.
- This dataset combines raw counts for first/given names of male and female babies, sourced from multiple government data2019not a population count
toolbox.google.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 2 forms. 2019. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. This dataset combines raw counts for first/given names of male and female babies, sourced from multiple government data authorities.
Last verified 2026-05-11.
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.
- Cultural Atlasweb
- Naming customs of Hispanic Americaencyclopaedia
- Spanish naming customsencyclopaedia
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 Colombia?
- Antonella, according to RNEC — Nombres más registrados (newborn name statistics) (2024), with 4,500 bearers recorded among girls.
- What is the most common surname in Colombia?
- Rodríguez, according to RNEC — Nombres más registrados (newborn name statistics) (2019), with 9,202 bearers recorded.
- Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Colombia?
- Because they count different people. RNEC — Nombres más registrados (newborn name statistics) (2024) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Antonella. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Maria. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Colombia”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/CO (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from RNEC — Nombres más registrados (newborn name statistics).