Kwame
given name · Latin script
Meaning, in Akan: Akan (Ghana): male name for a Saturday-born child
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/kʷɑmej/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kwame is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Ghana than in any other country, where it is the 9th most common given name.
- GHGhana≈1 in 730(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 44K
- USUnited States1 in 76K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Ghana (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 366 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 730 (inferred from the name graph)
≈40,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Ghana, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Akan (Ghana): male name for a Saturday-born child.
Sources 1
- African Names
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
How Kwame is read(measured from records)
Kwame is one spelling over 2 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English83%
pers. name (K. Nkrumah)
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
- Akan75%
Akan (Ghana): male name for a Saturday-born child.
as a nameAfrican Names
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kwame 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GH Ghana | #9 | ≈40,000 est. | ≈1 in 730 | 161K | Kwame | 125 |
| CN China | — | ≈7,000 est. | ≈1 in 200K | — | Kwame | 16 |
| US United States | — | 4,356 | 1 in 76K | 4.3K | Kwame | 366 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈2,500 est. | ≈1 in 42K | — | Kwame | 5 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈1,500 est. | ≈1 in 44K | — | Kwame | 155 |
| LY Libya | #915 | ≈450 est. | ≈1 in 15K | — | Kwame | 2 |
| GY Guyana | #439 | 159 | 1 in 4.7K | 159 | Kwame | 4 |
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: Heuristic parse of ghanacitizenship.com; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)
Kwame is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Swahili, Akan name for a boy born on Saturday.
as a nameAfrican Muslim Names
Nacido en sábado
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
In Dutch, singular past subjunctive of komen
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)
- Kwame Nkrumahb. 1909GHGhanaian politician (1909–1972)
- Stokely Carmichaelb. 1941TTnot in their usual nameAmerican activist (1941-1998)
- Kwame Anthony Appiahb. 1954GBBritish-American philosopher and writer
- Kwame Kilpatrickb. 1970USAmerican politician and football player
- Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampongb. 1974GHGhanaian alpine skier
- Kwame Brownb. 1982USAmerican basketball player (born 1982)
- Zohran Mamdanib. 1991USnot in their usual nameAmerican politician and Mayor of New York City since 2026
- Ethan Ampadub. 2000GBnot in their usual nameWelsh association football player
- Tariq Lampteyb. 2000GBnot in their usual nameGhanaian association football player
- Peterkwame Aizawab. 2001JPnot in their usual nameJapanese association football player (2001-)
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 48 sources across 28 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 4.3K | #4,337 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 159 | #436 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 46 | #4,337 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 42 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 1990 | 8 | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
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
- How do you pronounce Kwame?
- A machine transcription gives /kʷɑmej/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Kwame mean, and where does it come from?
- Akan (Ghana): male name for a Saturday-born child. Recorded by African Names.
- In which country does Kwame have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 40 thousand people named Kwame in Ghana, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kwame.
- Is Kwame a male or female name?
- Kwame is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- How common is the name Kwame?
- In the United States, the national register counted 4,356 people named Kwame in 2020, about 1 in 76 thousand residents.
- How common is Kwame compared with other names?
- In Ghana, Kwame is the 9th most common given name of 14,081 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kwame?
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/kwameThe 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, “Kwame” — the 9th most common given name in Ghana. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.