Names of New Caledonia NC

The names that most distinguish New Caledonia from the rest of the world are Smith, Jones and Susan.

Written in French.

Population
290K
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
547
BBuilt from 1 official register, 547 name forms in our corpus, 3 cited works.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of New Caledonia are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, New Caledonia included.

How names work in New Caledonia

2 naming traditions are in use in New Caledonia, 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 New Caledonia

Characteristic of New Caledonia

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Smithsurname●
Jonessurname●
Williamssurname●
Susangiven name●
Davissurname●
The best-attested names in New Caledonia, 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

  • This dataset presents the top ten names given in Nouméa since 1860, published by the Ville de Nouméa.2020not a population count

    pacificdata.org. Counts: not recorded. given. 5 forms. 2020. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. This dataset presents the top ten names given in Nouméa since 1860, published by the Ville de Nouméa. NAME-SEARCH SWEEP 2026-08-06: checked ISEE-NC (isee.nc — census/demography open data by commune, no per-name search) for a live per-name existence/frequency oracle. Confirmed France's INSEE 'Fichier des prénoms' lookup tool is scoped to metropolitan France + DOM only — New Caledonia's sui generis post-1998 status (no longer a TOM) excludes it from that dataset, a confirmed exclusion rather than an unchecked gap. No live per-name oracle found; not re-searched until infrastructure changes.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

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 New Caledonia?
No — 2 are described on this page (Papua New Guinean and Melanesian, French), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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