Names of Iceland IS

In Iceland the second name is a patronymic — the father's given name, renewed each generation — rather than an inherited family name; Hagstofa Íslands — most common ættarnöfn (Hagtíðindi 2018) records Blöndal as the commonest surname in Iceland.

Written in Icelandic.

Population
351K
Official registers
6
Name forms recorded
4.3K
ABuilt from 6 official registers (2023), 1 sub-national, 4,268 name forms in our corpus, 9 cited works.

Official registers for given names and surnames, 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 Iceland are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Iceland included.

How names work in Iceland

Names in Iceland 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 Iceland

Counts everyone resident in the country · authority tier 1
Hagstofa — population register names 2023, 2023 — 101 given names counted over residents, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Anna4.8K—
2Guðrún4.5K5
3Kristín3.4K—
4Sigríður3.2K9
5Margrét/margrjet/margret2.8K81
6Helga2.7K11
7Sigrún2.5K—
8Ingibjörg2.1K—
9María2K—
10Jóhanna1.9K—
11Katrín1.6K—
12Elín1.6K22
13Eva1.5K—
14Hildur1.5K—
15Sara1.4K—
16Lilja1.4K—
17Elísabet/Elísabeth1.3K—
18Ragnheiður1.2K—
19Ásta1.2K—
20Guðbjörg1.2K37

No inherited surnames here

Icelandic naming is patronymic (Jónsson/Jónsdóttir) and inherited family names (ættarnöfn) have been legally closed to new adoption since 1925, so the stock is a small fixed list — 639 harvested from is-hagstofa-aettarnofn and is-arnastofnun-aettarnofn, which is close to complete. The high-value Icelandic target is GIVEN names plus the Mannanafnaskrá approved-names register, not surnames. Our record corpus does hold "surnames" for this country, but they are largely records of residents from elsewhere, so we do not publish them as a ranking.

Where the two lists disagree

24 of Hagstofa — population register names 2023's top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

Hagstofa — population register names 2023 2023Across all recordsanna: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. annanot rankedguðrún: 2 → 52. guðrún5kristín: 3 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country3. kristínnot rankedsigríður: 4 → 9 · ranks lower across all records4. sigríður9margrét/margrjet/margret: 5 → 81 · ranks lower across all records5. margrét/margrjet/margret81helga: 6 → 11 · ranks lower across all records6. helga11sigrún: 7 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country7. sigrúnnot rankedingibjörg: 8 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country8. ingibjörgnot rankedmaría: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. maríanot rankedjóhanna: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. jóhannanot rankedkatrín: 11 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country11. katrínnot rankedelín: 12 → 22 · ranks lower across all records12. elín22eva: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. evanot rankedhildur: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. hildurnot rankedsara: 15 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country15. saranot rankedlilja: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. liljanot rankedElísabet/Elísabeth: 17 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country17. Elísabet/Elísabethnot rankedragnheiður: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. ragnheiðurnot rankedásta: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. ástanot rankedguðbjörg: 20 → 37 · ranks lower across all records20. guðbjörg37erla: 21 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country21. erlanot rankedauður: 22 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country22. auðurnot rankedsteinunn: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. steinunnnot rankedguðný: 24 → 50 · ranks lower across all records24. guðný50kolbrún: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. kolbrúnnot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
Hagstofa — population register names 2023, 2023 on the left; every record we hold for Iceland 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 Iceland

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

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

Over time

ÞórAnnaKristínGuðrúnJón202620267,827
Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry), 2004–2026 (23 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

Guðrúngiven name●
Sigríðurgiven name●
Einargiven name●
Helgagiven name●
Johanngiven name●
The best-attested names in Iceland, 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.

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

  • Hagstofa — population register names 20232023headline (given)

    Statistics Iceland (Hagstofa Íslands). Counts: residents. given. 101 forms. 2023.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 208 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=[]. source note:

    Last verified 2026-06-05.

  • Hagstofa Íslands — most common ættarnöfn (Hagtíðindi 2018)2017headline (surnames)

    Statistics Iceland (Hagstofa Íslands). Counts: residents. surname. 3 forms. 2017. Licence: Open data.

    What we know about this register

    The only official ættarnafn FREQUENCIES: 'Algengustu ættarnöfnin voru Blöndal (324), Thorarensen (293) og Hansen (282)' at 2017-01-01, against 640 registered ættarnöfn of which nearly 400 were actually borne, by about 12,000 people (~4% of the population). Same Hagtíðindi release ('Mannanöfn og nafngiftir á Íslandi', 2018-02-26) already held as is-hagstofa-naming-practice, whose parser took only the given-name top-3 and MISSED the surname section entirely — hence this separate surname-only source. Only 3 rows, but they are the sole bearer counts in existence for Icelandic family names; the existence list is is-arnastofnun-aettarnofn. The three figures are asserted in the fetcher and VERIFIED against the live PDF text at runtime, so an upstream revision fails loudly instead of silently. Neither Þjóðskrá nor the StatBank publishes any surname table: svc.skra.is NafnTidni rejects kenninafn=/eftirnafn=/millinafn= with HTTP 400, and px.hagstofa.is has given-name tables only. Fetcher scripts/fetch_is_aettarnofn.py.

    Last verified 2026-07-30.

  • Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry)2026not a population count

    Registers Iceland (Þjóðskrá Íslands). Counts: residents. given. 34,009 forms. 2004–2026. Licence: Open data.

    What we know about this register

    Per-name query API from the National Registry (Þjóðskrá). FULLY ENUMERATED as of 2026-07-30: the name parameter is a SQL LIKE pattern, so eiginnafn=A%25 returns every registered name starting with A, and one query per initial letter dumps the whole register — 34,166 eiginnafn + 22,634 annadnafn = 46,901 distinct names ever borne. This REPLACED a seed-list probe that reached only 9,005 names (19% coverage); every probed name was a subset of the enumeration, so nothing was lost. Enumerate a-z plus the Icelandic letters á é í ó ú ý þ æ ö ð and the Nordic å ø: diacritic folding applies only to letters OUTSIDE the Icelandic alphabet (ā%25 == a%25, ś%25/ş%25 == s%25), while Icelandic letters collate as distinct. `%25` alone times out (504); there is no row cap (summing two-char prefixes a?%25 reproduces the a%25 total exactly) and NO suppression threshold — exact counts are returned down to 1. svfn is optional; 9999 = 'Allt landið'. Each response is a yearly series (FjoldiAr) of living bearers in that position; the CURRENT-year figure is a rolling live value, not a 1 January snapshot (observed to move within days). ONE ROW PER NAME with count = first + second position, the split kept in data_note as position_first=/position_second= — emitting the two positions as separate rows was unsafe because build_combined dedupes on (source_id, name, sex, year, name_type, region_code) and silently dropped one of them. data_note also carries status=current or status=historical;last_seen=YYYY (12,753 names whose series died out; these include 614 patronymic-shaped registry artifacts such as Ívarsdóttir/Bjarnason that sat in the eiginnafn field and went to 0 in 2023 — filter on status, NOT on a -son/-dóttir suffix, since Jason/Nelson/Mason/Madison are genuine current given names). name_type is 'given' for BOTH slots: `annadnafn` is a POSITION, not the legal category millinafn — 3,626 committee-approved eiginnöfn occur in that slot against only 218 approved millinöfn, and it also holds family-derived middle names in no register at all (annadnafn=Blöndal -> 55-65 bearers, absent from Mannanafnaskrá). The authoritative millinafn flag is is-mannanafnaskra type=millinafn. NO SURNAME ROWS: the API exposes no kenninafn/eftirnafn dimension (those params return HTTP 400) and annadnafn=Jónsson / Jónsdóttir return []; note however that eiginnafn=Jónsson DOES return data (8 bearers in 2021, 0 from 2023). Icelandic hereditary surnames come from is-arnastofnun-aettarnofn. Fetcher scripts/fetch_is_skra.py; raw JSON cached under raw/IS/skra_enum/.

    Last verified 2026-07-30.

  • Hagstofa Íslands — Given-name frequency by population (2005)2005not a population count

    Statistics Iceland (Hagstofa Íslands). Counts: not recorded. given. 150 forms. 2005. Licence: Open data.

    What we know about this register

    Eiginöfn karla/kvenna eftir aldri 1. janúar 2005 — given names by age band, men (MAN11120a) and women (MAN11121). Using the 'Alls' (total) age band yields a 2005 whole-population given-name frequency, a historical snapshot distinct from the 2023 registry (is-hagstofa-registry). Rank computed by descending count within (year, sex).

    Last verified 2026-06-02.

  • Hagstofa Íslands — Newborn first/sole given names (2021)2021not a population count

    Statistics Iceland (Hagstofa Íslands). Counts: not recorded. given. 61 forms. 2021. Licence: Open data.

    What we know about this register

    Einnefni og fyrsta nafn — first or sole given name of children born 2021, boys (MAN11103) and girls (MAN11113). Name and display rank are embedded in the Röð valueText; counts from Eining=Fjöldi. Variant spellings are grouped by the source with '/' (e.g. Matthías/Mattías/Mathías). Distinct from the 2023 population-registry snapshot already held as is-hagstofa-registry.

    Last verified 2026-06-02.

  • Statistics Iceland — Names (1703–present)

    Statistics Iceland (Hagstofa Íslands). Counts: not recorded. given. 78 forms. Licence: Open data.

    What we know about this register

    First names, second names, and double names. Continuous from 1978; census data from 1703–1920. StatBank downloadable as CSV/Excel. R package 'hagstofan' wraps the API.

    Last verified 2026-05-09.

Sub-national registers

1 register for Iceland publishes regional lists only (Hagstofa Íslands — Icelandic names and naming practice (2018)). 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

What is the most common given name in Iceland?
Anna, according to Hagstofa — population register names 2023 (2023), with 4,782 bearers recorded among girls.
What is the most common surname in Iceland?
Blöndal, according to Hagstofa Íslands — most common ættarnöfn (Hagtíðindi 2018) (2017), with 324 bearers recorded.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Iceland?
Because they count different people. Hagstofa — population register names 2023 (2023) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Anna. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Guðrún. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Do people in Iceland have surnames?
Icelandic naming is patronymic (Jónsson/Jónsdóttir) and inherited family names (ættarnöfn) have been legally closed to new adoption since 1925, so the stock is a small fixed list — 639 harvested from is-hagstofa-aettarnofn and is-arnastofnun-aettarnofn, which is close to complete. The high-value Icelandic target is GIVEN names plus the Mannanafnaskrá approved-names register, not surnames.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Iceland”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/IS (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from Hagstofa — population register names 2023; Hagstofa Íslands — most common ættarnöfn (Hagtíðindi 2018).