Names of Nigeria NG

The names that most distinguish Nigeria from the rest of the world are Mohammed, Adamu and Nil; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Nigeria are Mohammed and Adamu.

Written in English, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo.

Population
214M
Official registers
8
Name forms recorded
39K
BBuilt from 8 official registers, 38,658 name forms in our corpus, 21 cited works.

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

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

How names work in Nigeria

4 naming traditions are in use in Nigeria, 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 Nigeria

Characteristic of Nigeria

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Mohammedgiven name●
Mrsgiven name●
Emmanuelgiven name●
Ibrahimgiven name●
Blessinggiven name●
The best-attested names in Nigeria, 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

Is there one naming system in Nigeria?
No — 4 are described on this page (Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, British), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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