Names of Estonia EE

Statistics Estonia — Ees- ja perekonnanimed (Population Register) records Tamm as the commonest surname in Estonia; the names that most distinguish Estonia from the rest of the world are Jelena, Vladimir and Olga.

Written in Estonian, Russian.

Population
1.2M
Official registers
3
Name forms recorded
19K
ABuilt from 3 official registers (2025), 19,310 name forms in our corpus, 29 cited works.

Official registers for given names and surnames, plus a written account of the naming system.

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

How names work in Estonia

6 naming traditions are in use in Estonia, 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 Estonia

Counts children born in the year · authority tier 1

This register publishes counts, not ranks; the numbering is the order of its own figures.

Siseministeerium — newborn names, 2025 — 14 given names counted over children born that year, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Mia30—
2Sofia24—
3Olivia18—
4Marta16—
5Emma11—
6Lenna10—
7Alisa7—
8Amelia7—
9Eva6—
10Loore6—
11Luna6—
12Mai6—
13Saara6—
14Nora4—

Where the two lists disagree

25 of Siseministeerium — newborn names's top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

Siseministeerium — newborn names 2025Across all recordsmark: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. marknot rankedkarl: 2 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country2. karlnot rankedlukas: 3 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country3. lukasnot rankedoliver: 4 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country4. olivernot rankedleon: 5 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country5. leonnot rankedhugo: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. hugonot rankedjohannes: 7 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country7. johannesnot rankedrobin: 8 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country8. robinnot rankedsebastian: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. sebastiannot rankedoskar: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. oskarnot rankedmattias: 11 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country11. mattiasnot rankedgustav: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. gustavnot rankedaron: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. aronnot rankedlucas: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. lucasnot rankedmiron: 15 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country15. mironnot rankedaaron: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. aaronnot rankeddaniel: 17 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country17. danielnot rankedkristofer: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. kristofernot rankedrobert: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. robertnot rankeddavid: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. davidnot rankedfranz: 21 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country21. franznot rankedjakob: 22 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country22. jakobnot rankedhans: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. hansnot rankedrasmus: 24 → 146 · ranks lower across all records24. rasmus146marten: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. martennot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
Siseministeerium — newborn names, 2025 on the left; every record we hold for Estonia on the right. A dashed line means the name is not in our top ranks for this country at all.

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 Estonia

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Names in Estonia are written in Latin (91%) and Cyrillic (9%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

Sergeigiven name●
Alekseigiven name●
Tatjanagiven name●
Jelenagiven name●
Svetlanagiven name●
The best-attested names in Estonia, 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

  • Siseministeerium — newborn names2025headline (given)

    Ministry of the Interior (Siseministeerium), Estonia. Counts: newborns. given. 61 forms. 2021–2025.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 283 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=['count']. source note: newborn_names_monthly_aggregated

    Last verified 2026-06-05.

  • Statistics Estonia — Ees- ja perekonnanimed (Population Register)2025headline (surnames)

    Statistics Estonia (Statistikaamet). Counts: not recorded. given and surname. 202 forms. 2021–2025. Licence: Open data Estonia.

    What we know about this register

    Estonia has a dedicated names statistics web app at stat.ee/nimed/ with popular first names and surnames by birth year, by county (maakond), and overall top lists. Data is embedded as HTML tables (no CSV/Excel download). Per-year data is grouped into 5-year periods (1936-1940, 1941-1945, …, 2021-2025). Top-N names per period only, not full frequency tables. Surname data at stat.ee/nimed/pere/TOP_AASTAD similarly structured. Source: Population Register. No API or machine-readable download available.

    Last verified 2026-05-10.

  • Statistics Estonia — per-name Population Register counts (nimed)

    Statistics Estonia (Statistikaamet). Counts: not recorded. given and surname. 8,509 forms. Licence: Open data Estonia.

    What we know about this register

    Per-token name lookup pages on stat.ee/nimed give living-person counts from the Population Register, split by sex. Given names: stat.ee/nimed/{NAME} -> 'eesnimi {Name} {F} naisel' and/or '... {M} mehel', plus popularity rank (naisenimi/mehenimi) and a top over-represented county (maakond). Surnames: stat.ee/nimed/pere/{NAME} -> 'perekonnanimi {Name} {M} mehel ja {F} naisel' with separate male/female popularity ranks. Names are queried from our existing EE seed lists (siseministeerium registry ~453K given tokens; ~103K surnames from leaks tree + neighbour surnames) via scripts/fetch_ee_stat.py, which is resumable (SQLite checkpoint in raw/EE/ee_stat_cache.sqlite, raw HTML cached). Emits one row per sex the page distinguishes; rank recomputed by descending count within (name_type, sex). This UPGRADES the prior existence-only ee-siseministeerium registry to real counts. year=None (snapshot of living persons). data_note=stat_ee_registry_living.

    Last verified 2026-06-03.

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

What is the most common given name in Estonia?
Mark, according to Siseministeerium — newborn names (2025), with 73 bearers recorded among boys.
What is the most common surname in Estonia?
Tamm, according to Statistics Estonia — Ees- ja perekonnanimed (Population Register), with 2,715 bearers recorded among girls.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Estonia?
Because they count different people. Siseministeerium — newborn names (2025) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Mark. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Sergei. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Is there one naming system in Estonia?
No — 6 are described on this page (Estonian, Russian, Ossetian, Uzbek and Russian, Chechen and Caucasian, Circassian), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Estonia”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/EE (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from Siseministeerium — newborn names; Statistics Estonia — Ees- ja perekonnanimed (Population Register).