Names of Sri Lanka LK
The names that most distinguish Sri Lanka from the rest of the world are Mudiyanselage, Bandara and Gedara; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Sri Lanka are Dilshan and Mudiyanselage.
Written in Sinhala, Tamil, English.
- Population
- 23M
- Name forms recorded
- 10K
No official register found for this country — the ranking below is our record corpus alone.
How names work in Sri Lanka
3 naming traditions are in use in Sri Lanka, 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 Sri Lanka
| # | Name | Estimated bearers | How common |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | Dilshan | — | — |
| 4 | Tharindu | — | — |
| 5 | Lahiru | — | — |
| 6 | Sampath | — | — |
| 7 | Lakshan | — | — |
| 9 | Fernando | — | — |
| 10 | Kasun | — | — |
| 12 | Isuru | — | — |
| 13 | Indika | — | — |
| 14 | Chathuranga | — | — |
| 15 | Chaminda | — | — |
| 16 | Pradeep | — | — |
| 17 | Pasindu | — | — |
| 18 | Amila | — | — |
| 19 | Buddhika | — | — |
| 21 | Madusanka | — | — |
| 22 | Saman | — | — |
| 23 | Sanjeewa | — | — |
| 24 | Sanduni | — | — |
| 25 | Madushan | — | — |
No official register
Characteristic of Sri Lanka
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Sri Lanka 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 Sri Lanka are written in Latin (96%) and Cyrillic (4%), 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
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.
- WASAGAMA (Surname) and Individual Name Changes among the Sinhalesepaper
- "What's in a name?"web
- How to address elders in Sinhalaweb
- Indian nameencyclopaedia
- Naming Conventions of Sri Lankaweb
- Portuguese-Sri Lankan Surnames and their meaningsweb
- Sinhala honorificsencyclopaedia
- Sinhalese nameencyclopaedia
- Sri Lanka Naming Customsgenealogy
- Sri Lankanweb
- Tamil honorificsencyclopaedia
- Tamil nameencyclopaedia
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 an official list of the most common names in Sri Lanka?
- We have not found one at an authority tier we would publish. The ranking on this page comes from our own record corpus and is labelled as such. If a register exists, we would like to hear about it.
- Is there one naming system in Sri Lanka?
- No — 3 are described on this page (Sinhalese, Tamil and South Indian, British), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Sri Lanka”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/LK (data snapshot 2026-09-12).