Names of Netherlands NL
CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) records Jansen as the commonest surname in the Netherlands; the names that most distinguish the Netherlands from the rest of the world are Johanna, Cornelis and Maria.
Written in Dutch, Western Frisian.
- Population
- 17M
- Official registers
- 3
- Name forms recorded
- 126K
At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.
How names work in Netherlands
2 naming traditions are in use in Netherlands, 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 Netherlands
| # | Name | Bearers recorded | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maria | 316K | 1 |
| 5 | Johanna | 251K | 3 |
| 9 | Anna | 130K | 6 |
| 13 | Cornelia | 106K | 8 |
| 14 | Elisabeth | 105K | 5 |
| 17 | Wilhelmina | 93K | 9 |
| 19 | Catharina | 81K | 11 |
| 22 | Hendrika | 67K | — |
| 24 | Adriana | 66K | 17 |
| 25 | Petronella | 65K | 16 |
| 45 | Margaretha | 44K | 37 |
| 46 | Yvonne | 42K | 59 |
| 50 | Jacoba | 40K | 28 |
| 51 | Monique | 39K | 65 |
| 52 | Helena | 38K | 21 |
| 57 | Geertruida | 37K | — |
| 67 | Esther | 33K | 69 |
| 75 | Ingrid | 31K | 85 |
| 78 | Anne | 30K | — |
| 81 | Antonia | 30K | 34 |
Where the two lists disagree
20 of Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017)'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 Netherlands
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Netherlands 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
Meertens Instituut, KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). Counts: not recorded. given. 26,225 forms. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Live scrape of the Meertens Instituut Nederlandse Voornamenbank (NVB) per-name HTML endpoint https://nvb.meertens.knaw.nl/naam/is/{Name}. Each name page gives all-time BRP (Basisregistratie Personen) bearer counts ("NL totaal (2017)", period 1790-2017) split by sex (m/v) and by position: "als eerste naam" (as first given name) vs "als volgnaam" (as subsequent/middle given name). Seeded from raw/NL/marisa_seed.parquet (499,241 NL-attested tokens, freq-desc), queried as given names. count = "als eerste naam" bearers per sex; the matching "als volgnaam" count is recorded in data_note. Cache (positives + negatives) at raw/NL/meertens/cache.jsonl; re-runnable scripts/fetch_nl_meertens.py (resumes from cache, time-boxed). Distinct from nl-meertens-nvb, which is a 2018 GitHub JSON mirror (open-nl-data) of the same bank; this source is the directly-scraped live endpoint.
Last verified 2026-06-03.
- CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007)2007headline (surnames)
CBG Centrum voor familiegeschiedenis (Meertens Instituut, KNAW). Counts: not recorded. surname. 79,281 forms. 2007. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Nederlandse Familienamenbank (CBG/Meertens). Per-surname national bearer counts from the 2007 GBA/BRP (Dutch civil register). Queried per name via detail_naam.php?gba_naam={Name}, which returns "{N} personen" for 2007 plus a per-municipality distribution. Surnames with fewer than 5 bearers are suppressed ("< 5") for privacy and are treated as absent/negative. Site is geo-restricted to NL IPs and serves an invalid TLS chain, so fetch_nl_cbg.py queries through a NL residential proxy with verify=False. Seed = raw/NL/marisa_seed.parquet (NL-attested tokens, queried freq-desc as surnames). Every queried name is cached under raw/NL/cbg/ (positive count or "absent") for resumability and to record negatives. Verification: Jansen = 73,533 personen (2007).
Last verified 2026-06-03.
- Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018)not a population count
Meertens Instituut, KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). Counts: not recorded. given. 39,184 forms. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Meertens Instituut Nederlandse Voornamenbank (NVB) all-time bearer counts from Dutch BRP (Basisregistratie Personen) as of 2018. GitHub mirror by open-nl-data initiative: github.com/open-nl-data/dutch-names-dataset. 657k unique first names; 70,305 rows with count >= 5 (30,845 M + 39,460 F). Privacy threshold: counts < 5 shown as 0. These are all-time population stock counts, NOT newborn data. Top M: Johannes (813,633); top F: Maria (1,401,382). Historical naming patterns dominate (Johannes, Cornelis, Petrus). For annual newborn data, see nl-svb-kindernamen source (geo-blocked SVB).
Last verified 2026-05-12.
Sub-national registers
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 Netherlands?
- Maria, according to Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017), with 316,197 bearers recorded among girls.
- What is the most common surname in Netherlands?
- Jansen, according to CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) (2007), with 73,533 bearers recorded.
- Is there one naming system in Netherlands?
- No — 2 are described on this page (Dutch, Frisian), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Netherlands”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/NL (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007).