Names of Faroe Islands FO

Hagstova Føroya — Given names, living population (PX-Web, 2024) records Maria as the commonest given name in the Faroe Islands; the names that most distinguish the Faroe Islands from the rest of the world are Joensen, Barður and Høgni.

Written in Faroese, Danish.

Population
52K
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
583
BBuilt from 1 official register, 583 name forms in our corpus, 14 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.

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

How names work in Faroe Islands

2 naming traditions are in use in Faroe 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 Faroe Islands

Counts everyone resident in the country · authority tier 2

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

Hagstova Føroya — Given names, living population (PX-Web, 2024) — 9,316 given names counted over residents, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Maria276—
2Anna227—
3Annika2146
4Katrin189—
5Marjun178—
6Beinta174—
7Rannvá170—
8Heidi159—
9Elin15723
10Lív154—
11Hanna150—
12Súsanna144—
13Durita140—
14Kristina132—
15Barbara130—
16Sára130—
17Bjørg12445
18Rebekka124—
19Eva122—
20Tóra118—

Where the two lists disagree

24 of Hagstova Føroya — Given names, living population (PX-Web, 2024)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

Hagstova Føroya — Given names, living population (PX-Web, 2024)Across all recordsmaria: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. marianot rankedanna: 2 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country2. annanot rankedannika: 3 → 63. annika6katrin: 4 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country4. katrinnot rankedmarjun: 5 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country5. marjunnot rankedbeinta: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. beintanot rankedrannvá: 7 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country7. rannvánot rankedheidi: 8 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country8. heidinot rankedelin: 9 → 23 · ranks lower across all records9. elin23lív: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. lívnot rankedhanna: 11 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country11. hannanot rankedsúsanna: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. súsannanot rankeddurita: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. duritanot rankedkristina: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. kristinanot rankedbarbara: 15 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country15. barbaranot rankedsára: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. sáranot rankedbjørg: 17 → 45 · ranks lower across all records17. bjørg45rebekka: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. rebekkanot rankedeva: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. evanot rankedtóra: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. tóranot rankedjoan: 21 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country21. joannot rankedjóhanna: 22 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country22. jóhannanot rankedbára: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. báranot rankedelisabeth: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. elisabethnot rankedbirita: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. biritanot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
Hagstova Føroya — Given names, living population (PX-Web, 2024) on the left; every record we hold for Faroe Islands 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 Faroe Islands

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Names in Faroe Islands are written in Latin (93%) and Cyrillic (7%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

Annikagiven name●
Joensensurname●
Runigiven name●
Barðurgiven name●
Høgnigiven name●
The best-attested names in Faroe 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

  • Hagstova Føroya — Given names, living population (PX-Web, 2024)headline (given)

    Hagstova Føroya (Statistics Faroe Islands). Counts: residents. given. 9,316 forms. Licence: Open Government Data.

    What we know about this register

    Faroe Islands only. PX-Web StatBank table mk12_navn (IB05060): 1st/2nd given names of the whole living population by sex, persons count (2024 snapshot). 18,274 name codes (each code = UTF-16LE base64 of the name); response json-stat2. Normalized to 18,300 (name,sex) rows, 18,274 distinct names; suppressed counts (< 3 persons) returned as null and dropped. Per-year birth series 1985-2024 also available via m12_navn (men) / k12_navn (women).

    Last verified 2026-06-04.

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 Faroe Islands?
Maria, according to Hagstova Føroya — Given names, living population (PX-Web, 2024), with 276 bearers recorded among girls.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Faroe Islands?
Because they count different people. Hagstova Føroya — Given names, living population (PX-Web, 2024) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Maria. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Annika. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Is there one naming system in Faroe Islands?
No — 2 are described on this page (Faroese, Scandinavian), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Faroe Islands”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/FO (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from Hagstova Føroya — Given names, living population (PX-Web, 2024).