Names of Panama PA

The names that most distinguish Panama from the rest of the world are James, Abrego and Abdiel; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Panama are James and Abrego.

Written in Spanish.

Population
3.9M
Official registers
2
Name forms recorded
19K
BBuilt from 2 official registers, 18,648 name forms in our corpus, 3 cited works.

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

The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.

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

How names work in Panama

Names in Panama 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 Panama

Characteristic of Panama

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

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

Scripts & spelling

Jamesgiven name●
Incgiven name●
Abregosurname●
Smithsurname●
Quinterosurname●
The best-attested names in Panama, 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

  • Tribunal Electoral — Boletín, postulaciones for the 5 May 2024 general election2024not a population count

    Tribunal Electoral de Panamá. Counts: election candidates. given and surname. 3,588 forms. 2024. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    The only OFFICIALLY PUBLISHED Panamanian name source obtained: Boletín del Tribunal Electoral of 11 Jan 2024, 'LISTADO DE PUBLICACIÓN DE POSTULACIONES', 588 pages covering president, PARLACEN and National Assembly deputies, mayors and district representatives (principal + suplente). 13,671 candidacies anchored on the cédula column; count = candidacies, so a candidate recurs once per endorsing party in an alliance. 3,613 given names + 1,996 surnames. ACQUISITION: the TE's own site returns 403 and datosabiertos.gob.pa returned HTTP 502 on every path on 2026-07-25 — verified direct AND through a residential Panama-routed proxy, so the portal backend is down rather than geofencing. Obtained from La Prensa's CDN mirror of the same bulletin. SPLITTING: the Spanish given/surname boundary is not positional, so it is chosen by maximum likelihood against a discriminative lexicon built from this repo's own ES/CR/CL/MX/AR/UY/BO/CO/VE/DO/GT/HN/NI/PY/EC/PE/SV/CU/PR data (515,422 tokens; only 5.9% of ballot tokens unseen). Both apellidos are emitted separately and particles stay attached ('UREÑA DE MADURO'). Built by scripts/build_pa_te_candidatos.py.

    Last verified 2026-07-25.

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

    Wikidata / Wikimedia Foundation. Counts: notable people. given and surname. 784 forms. Licence: CC0.

    What we know about this register

    Given names + surnames among Wikidata persons with P27=Q804. Snapshot 2026-07-25. N given: 786, N surnames: 775. Extends the existing parse_wikidata_gap_countries.py pattern (AF, AO, CD, KP, MG, ML, MW, MZ, NE, NP, SD, UG) to this country. Unlike that script this captures the NATIVE-SCRIPT label as well, by grouping on the name item rather than its English label — `name` holds the es form and `name_romanized` the English transliteration. Heavy notability bias — politicians, athletes, diaspora and historical figures are over-represented and the frequencies do NOT represent the living population; use as a low-confidence floor only. For Iraq it is nonetheless the only source of tribal nisba surnames, since the civil registry is purely patronymic. Built by scripts/parse_wikidata_pa_sy_iq_ye.py.

    Last verified 2026-07-25.

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.

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