Names of Germany DE

The names that most distinguish Germany from the rest of the world are Hessen, Schmidt and Wolfgang; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Germany are Sebastian and Müller.

Written in German.

Population
80M
Official registers
4
Name forms recorded
229K
BBuilt from 4 official registers, 1 sub-national, 229,292 name forms in our corpus, 11 cited works.

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

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

How names work in Germany

3 naming traditions are in use in Germany, 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 Germany

Characteristic of Germany

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

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

Over time

EmiliaEmmaAnnaSophiaMarie20132025144
Stadt München Open Data — Vornamen von Nulljährigen, 2013–2025 (13 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

Sebastiangiven name●
Michaelgiven name●
Stefangiven name●
Thomasgiven name●
Andreasgiven name●
The best-attested names in Germany, 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

  • Stadt Düsseldorf Open Data — Vornamen Neugeborene2020not a population count

    Stadt Düsseldorf (Standesamt). Counts: newborns. given. 2,038 forms. 2008–2020. Licence: dl-de/by-2-0.

    What we know about this register

    Two files per year: Vornamen_Jungen_{year}.csv (m) and Vornamen_Mädchen_{year}.csv (URL-encoded: Vornamen_M%C3%A4dchen_{year}.csv). Semicolon-delimited. Columns: anzahl;vorname;geschlecht. Available: 2008-2016, 2018, 2020 (2017, 2019, 2021+ return 404). Appears abandoned after 2020. Düsseldorf is Germany's 7th largest city (~620k population); city-level only.

    Last verified 2026-05-10.

  • Stadt Leipzig Open Data — Vornamensstatistik Neugeborene2025not a population count

    Stadt Leipzig (Stadtarchiv / Standesamt). Counts: newborns. given. 1,648 forms. 2014–2025. Licence: dl-de/by-2-0.

    What we know about this register

    Leipzig CKAN open data portal. 12 datasets 2014-2025, ~3700 records/year. CSVs fetched via CKAN package_search API (resource UUIDs vary per year). Wide format (2014-2020): alternating M/F columns. Tidy format (2021+): vorname, anzahl, geschlecht (m/w), position (rank). Leipzig is Germany's 8th largest city (~610k population); city-level only.

    Last verified 2026-05-10.

  • Stadt München Open Data — Vornamen von Nulljährigen2025not a population count

    Stadt München (Standesamt). Counts: newborns. given. 304 forms. 2013–2025. Licence: CC BY 4.0.

    What we know about this register

    Munich CKAN open data portal. 13 datasets 2013-2025, ~1000 records/year. CSVs fetched via CKAN package_show API (resource UUIDs vary per year). Some files have UTF-8 BOM. Columns: vorname, anzahl, geschlecht (m/w). Munich is Germany's 3rd largest city (~1.5M population); city-level only.

    Last verified 2026-05-10.

  • GfdS — Vornamendatenbank (quasi-official, 1990–present)2024not a population count

    Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache (GfdS). Counts: newborns. given. 10 forms. 2012–2024. Licence: Top lists free; full database requires licensing.

    What we know about this register

    GfdS is a linguistic society, NOT a government body — no official federal name statistics exist (Destatis does not publish names). GfdS compiles from ~90% of civil registries. Top-10/100/1000 lists free online; 300k+ name database requires paid access.

    Last verified 2026-05-10.

Sub-national registers

1 register for Germany publishes regional lists only (Stadt München Standesamt — Vornamenstatistik PDF (official publication)). 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.

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 Germany?
No — 3 are described on this page (German, Romansh, Luxembourgish), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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