Names of India IN

The names that most distinguish India from the rest of the world are Kumar, Singh and Devi; in our record corpus the commonest names held in India are Ram and Kumar.

Written in Hindi, English, Assamese, Bangla and 11 more.

Population
1.3B
Official registers
10
Name forms recorded
624K
BBuilt from 10 official registers, 2 sub-national, 623,824 name forms in our corpus, 35 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 India are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, India included.

How names work in India

6 naming traditions are in use in India, 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 India

Characteristic of India

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

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

Over time

RamaMohammedRajeshSanjaySunil1889201774,885
naampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls), 1887–2017 (131 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

Names in India are written in Latin (85%) and Devanagari (15%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

Pradeshgiven name●
Kumarsurname●
Uttargiven name●
मूळsurname●
Devisurname●
The best-attested names in India, 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

  • Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rollsnot a population count

    Instate (Chintalapati, Sood et al. / appeler) — derived from Indian electoral rolls. Counts: registered voters. surname. 194,807 forms. Licence: CC0-1.0.

    What we know about this register

    Public lastname_langs_india file: 194,808 surnames with NATURAL spellings (singh/devi/kumar/sharma), each attributed across 37 Indian languages. count = sum of per-language attribution weights (frequency PROXY, evidence=frequency, not a headcount); dominant language recorded in data_note (no language field in the tree schema). National rows (region_code=null). Preferred over the -bystate cut for name matching because spellings are clean. CC0, no IRB; electoral-roll-derived, NOT forebears/philipperemy.

    Last verified 2026-07-01.

  • naampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls)2017not a population count

    in-rolls / naampy (Gaurav Sood et al.) — derived from Indian state electoral rolls. Counts: registered voters. given. 89,246 forms. 1887–2017. Licence: MIT.

    What we know about this register

    Electoral-roll-derived aggregate per first-name x state x birth-year, sex-split (n_male/n_female). Built from the naampy v2_en cut (English transliteration of native-script rolls): clean romanized names, 10 Hindi-belt + Maharashtra states (BR,CH,HP,HR,JH,MH,MP,RJ,UK,UP), 1887-2017, ~338.8M total bearers, 233,521 distinct names. Output carries BOTH national rows (region_code=null) and per-state rows (region_code=ISO 3166-2:IN). The Latin v2/v2_1k cuts (31 states) were rejected: their names are phonetically collapsed (raam/moo/sekh) and unusable as published names. MIT-licensed, no IRB; NOT forebears/philipperemy.

    Last verified 2026-06-29.

  • The report provides a detailed overview of civil registration and vital statistics in South Asia, published by UNICEF.2018not a population count

    www.unicef.org. Counts: not recorded. given. 16 forms. 2018. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. The report provides a detailed overview of civil registration and vital statistics in South Asia, published by UNICEF.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

  • Top baby names in India published by BabyNames.com.2023not a population count

    babynames.com. Counts: newborns. given. 10 forms. 2023. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Top baby names in India published by BabyNames.com.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

  • The Indian name database provides a list of popular Indian surnames and first names categorized by gender and frequency,2023not a population count

    census.name. Counts: residents. given and surname. 10 forms. 2023. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. The Indian name database provides a list of popular Indian surnames and first names categorized by gender and frequency, published by Census Name.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

  • This page features a list of popular Indian baby names presented by TODAY.2024not a population count

    www.today.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 10 forms. 2024. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. TODAY.com (US lifestyle/parenting site) editorial list of Indian baby names; 20-row parquet is rank-only (count=0, sex='/') — American parenting site curation, not official Indian statistics.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

  • This page discusses the most common names in India and is published by Asianet News.2023not a population count

    hindi.asianetnews.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 5 forms. 2023. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Asianet News Hindi article on most common Indian names; 9-row parquet has wildly inconsistent counts (राम=5.6M, मोहम्मद=4.25M vs अनिता=1347, राजेश=1417) mixing population stock totals with small sample counts. Includes श्री (Sri — an honorific, not a given name) with 3.7M count.

    Last verified 2026-05-12.

  • This page discusses the most common names in India based on an analysis of election and census data, published by Housen2014not a population count

    housenama.com. Counts: not recorded. given and surname. 4 forms. 2014. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. This page discusses the most common names in India based on an analysis of election and census data, published by Housenama.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

  • The article discusses common first and last names in India, published by Nimish V Adani on Medium.2014not a population count

    medium.com. Counts: not recorded. given and surname. 4 forms. 2014. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Medium blog post by individual author (Nimish V Adani); 7-row parquet mixes given names (Ramesh 18M, Lakshmi 1.9M, Srinivas) and surnames (Kumar 15M, Fernandes 81K, Patil 2.4M) with total population stock counts — personal analysis article, not official statistics.

    Last verified 2026-05-12.

  • This article discusses the most popular names worldwide, published by Zee News.2021not a population count

    zeenews.india.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 3 forms. 2021. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Zee News article on most popular names worldwide (global counts); 5-row parquet includes श्री (Sri — an honorific prefix, not a given name) with implausibly large global-not-India counts. Not India-specific data.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

Sub-national registers

2 registers for India publish regional lists only (India Names Dataset — Andhra Pradesh Electoral Rolls (Internet Archive); Bihar Jati Adharit Ganana 2023 (Bihar Caste-Based Survey) — caste-wise population, surname-mappable subset). 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 India?
No — 6 are described on this page (Hindi and North Indian, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil and South Indian, Punjabi and Sikh), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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