Names of Norway NO

SSB — Navn (1880–present) records Noah as the commonest given name in Norway; the names that most distinguish Norway from the rest of the world are Johansen, Olsen and Hansen.

Written in Norwegian, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, se.

Population
5.5M
Official registers
3
Name forms recorded
39K
BBuilt from 3 official registers (2025), 39,027 name forms in our corpus, 12 cited works.

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

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

How names work in Norway

2 naming traditions are in use in Norway, 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 Norway

Counts not recorded by the publisher · authority tier 2

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

SSB — Navn (1880–present), 2025 — 1,050 given names counted over a population the publisher did not record.
#NameBearers recordedOur rank
1Noah460—
2Emil40567
3Emma38684
4Olivia368—
5William368114
6Elias357—
7Nora35785
8Ella348—
9Oliver343—
10Frida337—
11Sofie336—
12Isak320—
13Liam314—
14Ellinor308—
15Johannes305—
16Alma297—
17Jakob29782
18Astrid29664
19Hedda296—
20Selma292—

Where the two lists disagree

25 of SSB — Navn (1880–present)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

SSB — Navn (1880–present) 2025Across all recordsnoah: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. noahnot rankedemil: 2 → 67 · ranks lower across all records2. emil67emma: 3 → 84 · ranks lower across all records3. emma84olivia: 4 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country4. olivianot rankedwilliam: 5 → 114 · ranks lower across all records5. william114elias: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. eliasnot rankednora: 7 → 85 · ranks lower across all records7. nora85ella: 8 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country8. ellanot rankedoliver: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. olivernot rankedfrida: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. fridanot rankedsofie: 11 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country11. sofienot rankedisak: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. isaknot rankedliam: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. liamnot rankedellinor: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. ellinornot rankedjohannes: 15 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country15. johannesnot rankedalma: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. almanot rankedjakob: 17 → 82 · ranks lower across all records17. jakob82astrid: 18 → 64 · ranks lower across all records18. astrid64hedda: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. heddanot rankedselma: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. selmanot rankedolav: 21 → 47 · ranks lower across all records21. olav47leah: 22 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country22. leahnot rankedtheodor: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. theodornot rankedsofia: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. sofianot rankedmatheo: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. matheonot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
SSB — Navn (1880–present), 2025 on the left; every record we hold for Norway 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 Norway

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

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

Over time

AnneJanBjørnPerOle194520251,832
SSB — Navn (1880–present), 1945–2025 (81 years). The line is that register's own figure for each year — not a total across registers, which would count the same people twice. The publisher labels this series “flow”.

Up to five names at a time.

Scripts & spelling

Jangiven name●
Kristingiven name●
Hansensurname●
Johansensurname●
Olsensurname●
The best-attested names in Norway, 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

  • SSB — Navn (1880–present)2025headline (given)

    Statistics Norway (SSB). Counts: not recorded. given. 1,349 forms. 1945–2025. Licence: Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data (NLOD).

    What we know about this register

    Top-50 given names for boys and girls by birth year from 1880. All names ≥3 occurrences available via SSB Statbank. PxWeb API available.

    Last verified 2026-05-09.

  • SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)not a population count

    Statistics Norway (SSB). Counts: not recorded. given and surname. 73,770 forms. Licence: Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data (NLOD).

    What we know about this register

    Per-name Solr-style JSON service backing the SSB name-search page. Each response returns docs[] with count/type/gender; type in {firstgiven, onlygiven, family, middleandfamily}. GIVEN count = firstgiven+onlygiven (per gender M/F); SURNAME count = family. Counts are suppressed below 4, so a returned count of exactly 4 means "<=4" (flagged as ";<=4" in data_note). No prefix/enumeration endpoint exists — names must be probed individually, so coverage is seed-driven: Norwegian+Scandinavian tokens harvested from all_official_names_freq.parquet (cc in NO/SE/DK) plus the NO leaks tree. Counts reflect the current living population (data_note=ssb_navn_living), not births-by-year. Fetcher: scripts/fetch_no_ssb.py (resumable; raw cache under raw/NO/cache/).

    Last verified 2026-06-03.

  • SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)2025not a population count

    Statistics Norway (SSB). Counts: not recorded. given and surname. 2,934 forms. 2013–2025. Licence: Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data (NLOD).

    What we know about this register

    Adds the YEAR dimension missing from no-ssb-navn (a per-name probe giving only a single "current living" aggregate). This is a proper bulk PxWebApi StatBank query, not a per-token scrape: table 10501 ("Persons, by first name") covers 2152 given names x 13 years (2013-2025, sex-prefixed 1=F/2=M, floor of 200 bearers at year-end) and table 12891 ("Last names used by 200 persons or more") covers 3706 surnames x 8 years (2018-2025), each fetched in ONE POST query with filter=all -- no per-name looping. Narrower name coverage than no-ssb-navn (which probes a much larger seed down to a floor of 4) but the only NO source with a genuine time series for the common-name subset. Verified: Emma/F/2025=14,281 (exact match to a live single-name PxWebApi query). Fetcher: scripts/fetch_no_ssb_pxweb.py (single-shot, no caching/resumability needed -- reruns in seconds).

    Last verified 2026-07-14.

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 Norway?
Noah, according to SSB — Navn (1880–present) (2025), with 460 bearers recorded.
Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Norway?
Because they count different people. SSB — Navn (1880–present) (2025) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is Noah. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is Jan. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Is there one naming system in Norway?
No — 2 are described on this page (Scandinavian, Sami), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Norway”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/NO (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from SSB — Navn (1880–present).