Names of Guatemala GT
RENAP — annual births (2025) records Ailany as the commonest given name in Guatemala; the names that most distinguish Guatemala from the rest of the world are Jose, Luis and Carlos.
Written in Spanish.
- Population
- 17M
- Official registers
- 2
- Name forms recorded
- 24K
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 Guatemala
Names in Guatemala 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 Guatemala
Where the two lists disagree
3 of RENAP — annual births's top 5 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 Guatemala
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Guatemala 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
The Latin alphabet here is not the ASCII one. Stripping diacritics merges names that are not the same name and changes how they are pronounced, and a record that has been ASCII-folded has lost information no amount of guessing recovers.
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
- RENAP — annual births2025headline (given)
Registro Nacional de las Personas (RENAP), Guatemala. Counts: residents. given. 10 forms. 2022–2025.
What we know about this register
Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 48 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=['count']. source note: renap_annual_births_top10
Last verified 2026-06-05.
- The article by Carlos Álvarez highlights the most common names in Guatemala according to the Registro Nacional de las Pe2025not a population count
www.soy502.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 5 forms. 2025. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. The article by Carlos Álvarez highlights the most common names in Guatemala according to the Registro Nacional de las Personas (Renap).
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 Guatemala?
- Ailany, according to RENAP — annual births (2025), with 3,907 bearers recorded among girls.
- Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Guatemala?
- Because they count different people. RENAP — annual births (2025) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Ailany. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Jose. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Guatemala”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/GT (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from RENAP — annual births.