Nghĩa
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Sino-Vietnamese: “righteousness, justice”; in the poem dedicated to Kiến An vương, son of Gia Long and brother of Minh Mạng
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Nghĩa is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 93K(measured from records)
- ISIceland1 in 117K
- SESweden1 in 140K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 98 (measured from records)
- 1 in 93K (inferred from the name graph)
3,581 people, 2020
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Nghia in US United States, NL Netherlands.
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)
Sino-Vietnamese: “righteousness, justice”; in the poem dedicated to Kiến An vương, son of Gia Long and brother of Minh Mạng.
Sources 1
- Tên Họ Người Việt Nam
Attested across 5 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Nghĩa 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 3,581 | 1 in 93K | 3.1K | Nghia | 98 |
| SE Sweden | 73 | 1 in 140K | 73 | — | 5 |
| FI Finland | 23 | 1 in 242K | 81 | — | 6 |
| PL Poland | 19 | 1 in 2M | 20 | — | 1 |
| NL Netherlands | 16 | 1 in 1.1M | 16 | Nghia | 9 |
| DK Denmark | 11 | 1 in 534K | 11 | — | — |
| IS Iceland | 3 | 1 in 117K | 3 | — | — |
3,581 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); dane.gov.pl — PESEL given names (first + second name position, 2026-01-20); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry). 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)
Nghĩa is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Vietnamese, Han-Viet “righteousness, duty”; cited here as one of the Confucian virtues used in sibling names.
as a nameTên Họ Người Việt Nam
In Vietnamese, Han-Viet “righteousness, duty”; cited as the corresponding son’s name in a shared-name pair.
as a nameTên Họ Người Việt Nam
In Vietnamese, Hán-Việt from 義, ‘righteousness; justice’; a learned name chosen for auspicious meaning.
as a nameTên Họ Người Việt Nam
In Vietnamese, a meaning; a sense
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)
- Wang Yib. 1431not in their usual namepolitician
- Thomas Hsiangb. 1948USnot in their usual nameAmerican Go Player
- Robert Ribeirob. 1949GBnot in their usual nameHong Kong judge
- Yiwang Chenb. 1970CNnot in their usual nameChinese materials scientist
- Li Yinot in their usual nameSong dynasty person CBDB = 13553
- Wang Yinot in their usual nameMing dynasty person CBDB = 282870
- Wang Yinot in their usual nameMing dynasty person CBDB = 242449
- Wang Yinot in their usual nameMing dynasty person CBDB = 253904
- Wang Yinot in their usual nameMing dynasty person CBDB = 317395
- Wang Yinot in their usual nameMing dynasty person CBDB = 260398
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 3 sources across 2 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL given names (first + second name position, 2026-01-20) | 2026 | 7 | #13,929 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 6 | #14,698 |
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Nghĩa mean, and where does it come from?
- Sino-Vietnamese: “righteousness, justice”; in the poem dedicated to Kiến An vương, son of Gia Long and brother of Minh Mạng. Recorded by Tên Họ Người Việt Nam.
- Is Nghĩa a male or female name?
- Nghĩa 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.
- In which country does Nghĩa have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 3.6 thousand people named Nghĩa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled nghia.
- Where is Nghĩa most common?
- Nghĩa is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 93 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Nghĩa?
- In the United States, the national register counted 3,581 people named Nghĩa in 2020, about 1 in 93 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Nghĩa?
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/ngh%C4%A9aThe 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, “Nghĩa”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.