Ahmad
surname · Latin script
Meaning: praised/commendable; used in Ibn Rushd’s name
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈɑmɑd/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Ahmad is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Pakistan than in any other country, where it is the 3rd most common surname.
- MYMalaysia≈1 in 98(inferred from the name graph)
- PKPakistan≈1 in 99
- SASaudi Arabia≈1 in 184
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Ahmad itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Pakistan (inferred from the name graph)
- #110 (measured from records)
- 11 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 441 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 98 (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,300,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Malaysia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Ahmed in BD Bangladesh, SY Syria, Amit in IN India and Ahamad in SA Saudi Arabia.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
praised/commendable; used in Ibn Rushd’s name
Sources 1
- African Muslim Names
Attested across 10 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Ahmad counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PK Pakistan | #3 | ≈2,300,000 est. | ≈1 in 99 | 1 | Ahmad | 198 |
| IN India | #37 | 476,437 | 1 in 2.8K | 476K | Amit | 345 |
| ID Indonesia | #44 | ≈450,000 est. | ≈1 in 594 | listed | Ahmad | 278 |
| BD Bangladesh | #15 | ≈440,000 est. | ≈1 in 370 | listed | Ahmed | 217 |
| NG Nigeria | #14 | ≈410,000 est. | ≈1 in 524 | — | Ahmad | 97 |
| MY Malaysia | #1 | ≈330,000 est. | ≈1 in 98 | 3.4K | Ahmad | 181 |
| SA Saudi Arabia | #69 | ≈190,000 est. | ≈1 in 184 | listed | Ahamad | 66 |
| SY Syria | #417 | ≈91,000 est. | ≈1 in 213 | — | Ahmed | 64 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) — Form-33 List of Contesting Candidates, 2018 General Election; data.gov.my — Name Popularity Dashboard (JPN, by decade and ethnicity). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Ahmad is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Arabic, most praiseworthy; name of Prophet Muhammad
as a nameAfrican Muslim Names
‘Highly commendable’. ‘A’isha 9 ‘Alive’, ‘thriving’; name of Muhammad's third and favourite wife. ‘Ala’ 3 ‘Excellence’, ‘supremacy’. ‘Ali ¢ ‘Sublime’; name of a cousin of the Prophet, who married his daughter Fatima and in 656 became the fourth rightly guided caliph. His sons HASAN and Husayn are regarded by Shiites as Muhammad’s true successors. Feminine form: ‘Aliyya.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In Swedish, Ahmad (m.fl. former) är av arabiskt ursprung och betyder ’lovvärd’. Det är ett av profeten Muhammeds namn.
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
In Arabic, more, most grateful
as a nameAfrican Muslim Names
El más fervoroso adorador
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Faiz Ahmad Faizb. 1911PKPakistani Urdu poet and author (1911–1984)
- Sheikh Abubakr Ahmadb. 1939INGrand Mufti of India, Nepal, Bhutan and other countries living Indian origins
- Samina Ahmadb. 1946PKPakistani actress
- Yasmin Ahmadb. 1958MYMalaysian film director (1958–2009)
- Fandi Ahmadb. 1962SGSingaporean footballer
- Atique Ahmedb. 1962INnot in their usual nameformer Indian politician & Gangster
- Fenar Ahmadb. 1981DKfilm director
- Tontowi Ahmadb. 1987IDIndonesian badminton player
- Hammadi Ahmadb. 1989IQIraqi footballer
- Evin Ahmadb. 1990SEKurdish-Swedish actress and author
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 122 sources across 63 countries.
Reference works 9
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Ismlar.com — Uzbek given-name dictionary (meanings, gender, origin)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Ahmad mean, and where does it come from?
- praised/commendable; used in Ibn Rushd’s name Recorded by African Muslim Names.
- How do you pronounce Ahmad?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈɑmɑd/ (IPA) for Urdu.
- What are other forms of the name Ahmad?
- In the etymology graph, Hameed, Ahmadu and Ehmed are forms of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Ahmad have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.3 million people named Ahmad in Pakistan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled ahmad.
- How common is the name Ahmad?
- In India, the national register counted 476,437 people named Ahmad, about 1 in 2.8 thousand residents.
- How common is Ahmad compared with other names?
- In Pakistan, Ahmad is the 3rd most common surname of 51,489 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Ahmad?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/ahmadThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Ahmad” — the 3rd most common surname in Pakistan. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.