Names of Malaysia MY

Malaysia has no single naming system: its communities build a name in different ways; data.gov.my — Baby Name Popularity Dashboard (HTML-embedded JSON) records Faridah as the commonest given name in Malaysia.

Written in Malay, Chinese, English, Tamil.

Population
33M
Official registers
7
Name forms recorded
82K
BBuilt from 7 official registers, 81,754 name forms in our corpus, 23 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 Malaysia are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Malaysia included.

How names work in Malaysia

6 naming traditions are in use in Malaysia, 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 Malaysia

Counts everyone resident in the country · authority tier 2

This register publishes counts, not ranks; the numbering is the order of its own figures.

data.gov.my — Baby Name Popularity Dashboard (HTML-embedded JSON) — 146 given names counted over residents, girls only, as the register publishes them.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Faridah8.1K39
2Norhayati7.3K47
3Noraini6.3K40
4Fatimah6K28
5Nurul6K6
6Rohana6K58
7Zaiton5.9K83
8Rohani5.4K108
9Nur Hidayah5.4K—
10Jamilah5.2K65
11Hamidah4.7K70
12Siti4.4K5
13Zarina4.4K—
14Rozita4.3K—
15Siti Hajar4.2K—
16Nur4.2K3
17Salmah4K90
18Siti Fatimah3.9K—
19Siti Aisyah3.8K—
20Nur Syafiqah3.8K—

No inherited surnames here

Malay Muslims use bin/binti patronymics with no inherited family name, while Chinese- and Indian-Malaysian communities do use surnames. A single national surname frequency table therefore describes only part of the population, and aggregating it as "Malaysian surnames" would misrepresent the majority. Also carries the documented name-ORDER collision (Chinese surname-first vs Malay patronymic), so any BR-style per-name harvest needs the order resolved first. 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record corpus does hold "surnames" for this country, but they are largely records of residents from elsewhere, so we do not publish them as a ranking.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 data.gov.my — Baby Name Popularity Dashboard (HTML-embedded JSON)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

data.gov.my — Baby Name Popularity Dashboard (HTML-embedded JSON)Across all recordsfaridah: 1 → 39 · ranks lower across all records1. faridah39norhayati: 2 → 47 · ranks lower across all records2. norhayati47noraini: 3 → 40 · ranks lower across all records3. noraini40fatimah: 4 → 28 · ranks lower across all records4. fatimah28nurul: 5 → 65. nurul6rohana: 6 → 58 · ranks lower across all records6. rohana58zaiton: 7 → 83 · ranks lower across all records7. zaiton83rohani: 8 → 108 · ranks lower across all records8. rohani108nur hidayah: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. nur hidayahnot rankedjamilah: 10 → 65 · ranks lower across all records10. jamilah65hamidah: 11 → 70 · ranks lower across all records11. hamidah70siti: 12 → 5 · ranks higher across all records12. siti5zarina: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. zarinanot rankedrozita: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. rozitanot rankedsiti hajar: 15 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country15. siti hajarnot rankednur: 16 → 3 · ranks higher across all records16. nur3salmah: 17 → 90 · ranks lower across all records17. salmah90siti fatimah: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. siti fatimahnot rankedsiti aisyah: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. siti aisyahnot rankednur syafiqah: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. nur syafiqahnot rankednorliza: 21 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country21. norlizanot rankedsiti aishah: 22 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country22. siti aishahnot rankedroslina: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. roslinanot rankednur atiqah: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. nur atiqahnot rankednurul hidayah: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. nurul hidayahnot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
data.gov.my — Baby Name Popularity Dashboard (HTML-embedded JSON) on the left; every record we hold for Malaysia 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 Malaysia

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Binsurname●
Mohdgiven name●
Sabahsurname●
Mohamadgiven name●
Bintigiven name●
The best-attested names in Malaysia, 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

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 Malaysia?
Faridah, according to data.gov.my — Baby Name Popularity Dashboard (HTML-embedded JSON), with 8,061 bearers recorded among girls.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Malaysia?
Because they count different people. data.gov.my — Baby Name Popularity Dashboard (HTML-embedded JSON) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Faridah. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Mohd. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Do people in Malaysia have surnames?
Malay Muslims use bin/binti patronymics with no inherited family name, while Chinese- and Indian-Malaysian communities do use surnames. A single national surname frequency table therefore describes only part of the population, and aggregating it as "Malaysian surnames" would misrepresent the majority. Also carries the documented name-ORDER collision (Chinese surname-first vs Malay patronymic), so any BR-style per-name harvest needs the order resolved first.
Is there one naming system in Malaysia?
No — 6 are described on this page (Indonesian and Malay, Chinese, Tamil and South Indian, Javanese, Cantonese and Hong Kong, Hokkien and Min), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Malaysia”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/MY (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from data.gov.my — Baby Name Popularity Dashboard (HTML-embedded JSON).