Names of Yemen YE
The names that most distinguish Yemen from the rest of the world are نسمة, محمد and Hassan; names here are written in both Arabic and Latin.
Written in Arabic.
- Population
- 30M
- Official registers
- 5
- Name forms recorded
- 13K
At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.
How names work in Yemen
2 naming traditions are in use in Yemen, 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 Yemen
Characteristic of Yemen
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Yemen 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
Names in Yemen are written in Arabic (78%), Latin (21%) and Hebrew (1%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.
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
- Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family namesnot a population count
Wikidata / Wikimedia Foundation. Counts: notable people. given and surname. 174 forms. Licence: CC0.
What we know about this register
Given names + surnames among Wikidata persons with P27=Q805. Snapshot 2026-07-25. N given: 174, N surnames: 69. 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 ar 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.
- Heuristic parse of taqreebye.comnot a population count
taqreebye.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 10 forms. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Heuristic parse of taqreebye.com
Last verified 2026-05-11.
- The page discusses the significance and variety of names used by Yemenis, published by Almotamar.net.2026not a population count
www.almotamar.net. Counts: not recorded. given. 6 forms. 2026. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. Almotamar.net (Yemeni news) article on the diversity and significance of Yemeni names; 20-row parquet has count=1 for all entries (علي, حسن, حسين, زيد...) — binary editorial list, not statistical frequency data.
Last verified 2026-05-12.
- The page provides rankings of common names for newborns in Yemen, published by a local forum.2012not a population count
juban.ahlamontada.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 6 forms. 2012. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. The page provides rankings of common names for newborns in Yemen, published by a local forum.
Last verified 2026-05-11.
- The page discusses naming trends in Yemen, focusing on unique names influenced by professions, culture, and media.2010not a population count
www.alkhaleej.ae. Counts: not recorded. given. 4 forms. 2010. Licence: unknown.
What we know about this register
Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. The page discusses naming trends in Yemen, focusing on unique names influenced by professions, culture, and media. DEMOTED 2026-07-25: UAE newspaper (alkhaleej.ae) feature on naming trends, not a Yemeni name-frequency dataset, while carrying status=normalized. ye-combined-rosters-names was then DROPPED 2026-08-02 (private staff and water-utility rosters, not a government publication — archived at /backup/global-dictionary/dropped-sources/2026-08-02/), so Yemen now has NO trusted official name source at all; only ye-wikidata-citizens-2026 (notable people) remains. That is a real acquisition gap, not coverage.
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.
- Arab Naming Conventionspaper
- Arabic nameencyclopaedia
- Cultural Atlasweb
- FamilySearchgenealogy
- FamilySearchgenealogy
- How Arabic Names Work: A Guide to Ism, Nasab, Laqab, Nisba, and Kunyaweb
- Iraqiweb
- Mondonomoweb
- Naming Conventions throughout the Arab Worldweb
- Sayariweb
- Understanding Arabic Naming Conventionsweb
- Wikipediaencyclopaedia
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 Yemen?
- No — 2 are described on this page (Yemeni and Gulf Tribal, Arabic), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Yemen”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/YE (data snapshot 2026-09-12).