Names of Timor-Leste TL

The names that most distinguish Timor-Leste from the rest of the world are Soares, Ximenes and Guterres; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Timor-Leste are Lisa and Soares.

Written in Portuguese, tet.

Population
1.4M
Official registers
4
Name forms recorded
1.1K
BBuilt from 4 official registers, 1,106 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 Timor-Leste are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Timor-Leste included.

How names work in Timor-Leste

2 naming traditions are in use in Timor-Leste, 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 Timor-Leste

Characteristic of Timor-Leste

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Timor-Leste 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.

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

Scripts & spelling

Westsurname●
Soaressurname●
Lisagiven name●
Jennifergiven name●
Marygiven name●
The best-attested names in Timor-Leste, 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 Timor-Leste?
No — 2 are described on this page (Tetum, Portuguese), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

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