Names of Israel IL
CBS Israel — Family names in Israel, 2017 ("שמות משפחה בישראל 2017") records כהן as the commonest surname in Israel; the names that most distinguish Israel from the rest of the world are Tel, אבו and בן.
Written in Hebrew, Arabic.
- Population
- 8.7M
- Official registers
- 2
- Name forms recorded
- 75K
Official registers for given names and surnames, plus a written account of the naming system.
How names work in Israel
3 naming traditions are in use in Israel, 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 Israel
This register publishes counts, not ranks; the numbering is the order of its own figures.
| # | Name | Bearers recorded | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | מאיה | 1.8K | 70 |
| 2 | רוז | 1.8K | — |
| 3 | אמל | 1.6K | — |
| 4 | לורין | 1.6K | — |
| 5 | אמירה | 1.5K | — |
| 6 | לור | 1.4K | — |
| 7 | נדיה | 1.4K | — |
| 8 | נור | 1.4K | — |
| 9 | לילה | 1.4K | — |
| 10 | ג'וליה | 1.3K | — |
| 11 | ארין | 1.3K | — |
| 12 | נבילה | 1.3K | — |
| 13 | נאיפה | 1.2K | — |
| 14 | ליליאן | 1.2K | — |
| 15 | נאי | 1.2K | — |
| 16 | נעימה | 1.2K | — |
| 17 | לורה | 1.2K | — |
| 18 | נדין | 1.1K | — |
| 19 | ודאד | 1.1K | — |
| 20 | ליא | 1.1K | — |
Where the two lists disagree
25 of CBS Israel — Names given to babies (1949–present)'s top 25 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 Israel
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Israel 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
Names in Israel are written in Hebrew (93%) and Latin (7%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.
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
- CBS Israel — Family names in Israel, 2017 ("שמות משפחה בישראל 2017")2017headline (surnames)
Central Bureau of Statistics Israel (CBS / LAMAS). Counts: residents. surname. 26,348 forms. 2017. Licence: Israeli government open data.
- CBS Israel — Names given to babies (1949–present)headline (given)
Central Bureau of Statistics Israel (CBS / LAMAS). Counts: newborns. given. 12,469 forms. Licence: Israeli government open data.
What we know about this register
8 sheets: Jewish/Muslim/Christian-Arab/Druze × M/F. Rows: name (col0), total count (col1, 'סך הכל'), per-year counts 1949-2024. Col name header in row2 is 'prati1'. Suppressed counts shown as '..' (1-4). Media release 391/2025.
Last verified 2026-05-10.
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.
- Arab Naming Conventionspaper
- Arabic nameencyclopaedia
- Hebraization of namesweb
- Hebraization of surnamesencyclopaedia
- How and Why Jews Hebraized Their Family Namesweb
- How Arabic Names Work: A Guide to Ism, Nasab, Laqab, Nisba, and Kunyaweb
- Iraqiweb
- Israeliweb
- Jewish Namesweb
- Naming Conventions throughout the Arab Worldweb
- The Foreigner's Guide to Israeli Namesweb
- Understanding Arabic Naming Conventionsweb
- What Do 'Ben' and 'Bat' Mean?web
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 Israel?
- מאיה, according to CBS Israel — Names given to babies (1949–present), with 1,828 bearers recorded among girls.
- What is the most common surname in Israel?
- כהן, according to CBS Israel — Family names in Israel, 2017 ("שמות משפחה בישראל 2017") (2017), with 179,293 bearers recorded.
- Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Israel?
- Because they count different people. CBS Israel — Names given to babies (1949–present) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is מאיה. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is יוסף. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
- Is there one naming system in Israel?
- No — 3 are described on this page (Israeli Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish, Arabic), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Israel”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/IL (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from CBS Israel — Family names in Israel, 2017 ("שמות משפחה בישראל 2017"); CBS Israel — Names given to babies (1949–present).