Names of Moldova MD
e-services.md — living population register records Maria as the commonest given name in Moldova; the names that most distinguish Moldova from the rest of the world are Natalia, Olga and Valentina.
Written in Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian.
- Population
- 3.4M
- Official registers
- 2
- Name forms recorded
- 3.7K
At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.
How names work in Moldova
6 naming traditions are in use in Moldova, 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 Moldova
| # | Name | Bearers recorded | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maria | 113K | — |
| 2 | Ion | 100K | — |
| 3 | Elena | 97K | — |
| 4 | Tatiana | 97K | — |
| 5 | Natalia | 85K | 5 |
| 6 | Andrei | 72K | — |
| 7 | Mihail | 68K | — |
| 8 | Serghei | 65K | 2 |
| 9 | Victor | 59K | 8 |
| 10 | Alexandru | 59K | 7 |
| 11 | Valentina | 58K | 9 |
| 12 | Olga | 57K | 10 |
| 13 | Ivan | 55K | 11 |
| 14 | Alexandr | 53K | — |
| 15 | Svetlana | 52K | 13 |
| 16 | Vasile | 50K | 14 |
| 17 | Vladimir | 47K | 15 |
| 18 | Ana | 47K | — |
| 19 | Irina | 46K | 16 |
| 20 | Ecaterina | 44K | — |
Where the two lists disagree
13 of e-services.md — living population register'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 Moldova
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Moldova 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
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
- e-services.md — living population registerheadline (given)
Agency for Public Services (ASP), Moldova (e-services.md). Counts: residents. given. 11,415 forms.
What we know about this register
Auto-backfilled registry stub (2026-06-05); verify publisher/URL. 3,354 rows, name_types=['given'], evidence=['count']. source note: state_pop_registry_living
Last verified 2026-06-05.
Agency of Public Services (ASP), Republic of Moldova. Counts: residents. given. 17 forms. 2024. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
ASP publishes annual open-data PDFs of top newborn given names with birth counts (2007–2023 available at asp.gov.md). 2024 data extracted from Flourish bar-chart-race visualisations published by diez.md (Feb–Mar 2025), which directly source ASP; cross-validated: all 2023 Flourish values match the official ASP 2023 PDF exactly. 34 rows (17M + 17F for 2024). Flourish boys: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/21845599/ — girls: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/13496561/
Last verified 2026-05-12.
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.
- How Russian Names Workpaper
- Circassiansencyclopaedia
- A primer on Chechen namesweb
- Behind the Namenamesite
- Chechen languageencyclopaedia
- Chechen Namesnamesite
- Chechensencyclopaedia
- Circassian diasporaencyclopaedia
- Circassian Names (Jaimoukha, oocities)web
- Circassiansencyclopaedia
- Circassians: Kinshipweb
- Crafting Identity: Surnames in the Turkish Republicweb
- Double Surnames Among Circassians in Homeland and Diaspora (Ionov 2024, Voprosy Onomastiki / Avesis)web
- Eastern Slavic naming customsencyclopaedia
- How Russian Patronymics Workweb
- Ingush peopleencyclopaedia
- Ingush submitted surnamesnamesite
- Kabardiansencyclopaedia
- Nakh languagesencyclopaedia
- Quora: Russified -ov/-ova names in the Caucasusweb
- Romania Naming Customsgenealogy
- Romanian Cultureweb
- Romanian nameencyclopaedia
- Romanian Personal Namesweb
- Russian given nameencyclopaedia
- Russian surnameencyclopaedia
- Russification of Central Asian namesweb
- Slavic name suffixesencyclopaedia
- South Ossetia Adopts Law On Surnamesweb
- Surname Law (Turkey)encyclopaedia
- Teipencyclopaedia
- The de-Russification of surnames in Central Asiaweb
- Tribal Unions and Clansweb
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 Moldova?
- Maria, according to e-services.md — living population register, with 113,244 bearers recorded.
- Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Moldova?
- Because they count different people. e-services.md — living population register counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Maria. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Serghei. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
- Is there one naming system in Moldova?
- No — 6 are described on this page (Romanian, Russian, Ossetian, Uzbek and Russian, Chechen and Caucasian, Circassian), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Moldova”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/MD (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from e-services.md — living population register.