Names of Nepal NP

NPHC 2021 — Population by caste/ethnicity group (national), surname-shaped categories only records Kshetri as the commonest surname in Nepal; the names that most distinguish Nepal from the rest of the world are बहादुर, राई and श्रेष्ठ.

Written in Nepali.

Population
30M
Official registers
2
Name forms recorded
78K
BBuilt from 2 official registers (2021), 78,127 name forms in our corpus, 6 cited works.

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

How names work in Nepal

Names in Nepal follow one naming tradition. Its structure, its given-name and surname stock, how to address someone and what trips software up are set out on its own page.

The most common names in Nepal

Where the two lists disagree

25 of NPHC 2021 — Population by caste/ethnicity group (national), surname-shaped categories only's top 25 surnames sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.

NPHC 2021 — Population by caste/ethnicity group (national), surname-shaped categories only 2021Across all recordskshetri: 1 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country1. kshetrinot rankedmagar: 2 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country2. magarnot rankedtharu: 3 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country3. tharunot rankedtamang: 4 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country4. tamangnot rankedbishwokarma: 5 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country5. bishwokarmanot rankedyadav: 6 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country6. yadavnot rankedrai: 7 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country7. rainot rankedpariyar: 8 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country8. pariyarnot rankedgurung: 9 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country9. gurungnot rankedthakuri: 10 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country10. thakurinot rankedmijar: 11 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country11. mijarnot rankedteli: 12 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country12. telinot rankedlimbu: 13 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country13. limbunot rankedkushwaha: 14 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country14. kushwahanot rankedkurmi: 15 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country15. kurminot rankedmusahar: 16 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country16. musaharnot rankeddhanuk: 17 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country17. dhanuknot rankedmallaha: 18 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country18. mallahanot rankedkewat: 19 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country19. kewatnot rankedkanu: 20 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country20. kanunot rankedkalwar: 21 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country21. kalwarnot rankedrajbansi: 22 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country22. rajbansinot rankedsherpa: 23 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country23. sherpanot rankedkumal: 24 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country24. kumalnot rankedtatma: 25 → not ranked · not in our corpus’s top ranks for this country25. tatmanot ranked
Hover a line for what is available to explain that row.
NPHC 2021 — Population by caste/ethnicity group (national), surname-shaped categories only, 2021 on the left; every record we hold for Nepal 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 Nepal

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Names in Nepal are written in Devanagari (100%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

प्रदेशgiven name●
बहादुरgiven name●
मायाgiven name●
बागमतीgiven name●
कुमारीgiven name●
The best-attested names in Nepal, 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

  • NPHC 2021 — Population by caste/ethnicity group (national), surname-shaped categories only2021headline (surnames)

    National Statistics Office / Central Bureau of Statistics, Nepal. Counts: residents. surname. 120 forms. 2021. Licence: Government of Nepal open data (National Population and Housing Census).

  • Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family namesnot a population count

    Wikidata / Wikimedia Foundation. Counts: notable people. given and surname. 319 forms. Licence: CC0.

    What we know about this register

    Top-N given names + surnames among Wikidata persons with P27=Q837. Snapshot 2026-05-19. N given: 328, N surnames: 148. Heavy notability bias — diaspora/leadership over-represented; use as low-confidence enrichment only. CHECKED 2026-08-06 (task #42 low-volume sweep): no per-name existence oracle found. Nepal's statistics body has been renamed/moved to National Statistics Office (nsonepal.gov.np, formerly referenced as CBS Nepal) -- its census-results subdomain appears to be aggregate 2021 census reports only (page too large to fully confirm, would need a direct manual check). Two per-person PII lookup candidates were noted but NOT confirmed well enough to catalog: Election Commission voter-list-db (election.gov.np/np/page/voter-list-db, could not confirm whether it's a live per-voter search or just downloadable rolls by polling station -- cert error blocked verification) and a National ID lookup (daomahotari.moha.gov.np / citizenportal.donidcr.gov.np, self-service own-credentials only). Neither added as a registry entry pending re-verification.

    Last verified 2026-05-19.

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 surname in Nepal?
Kshetri, according to NPHC 2021 — Population by caste/ethnicity group (national), surname-shaped categories only (2021), with 4,796,995 bearers recorded.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Nepal”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/NP (data snapshot 2026-09-12). Official figures from NPHC 2021 — Population by caste/ethnicity group (national), surname-shaped categories only.