Sèlma

given name · Latin script

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Sèlma is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Brazil than in any other country. In Bosnia & Herzegovina it is the 90th most common given name. Recorded meaning: From Ottoman Turkish سلمى (selma) (Turkish Selma), from Arabic سَلْمَى (salmā).

rarermore common
  • SESweden1 in 709(measured from records)
  • NONorway1 in 947
  • ISIceland1 in 996

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.

Brazil (measured from records)

94,743 people, 2022

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
75 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 709 (inferred from the name graph)

Sweden

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

SèlmaLatin(measured from records)
СельмаCyrillic(measured from records)

4 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Selma in NO Norway, SE Sweden, US United States and 1 more.

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)

Derivation of Sèlma: each step is the form the one above it came from.
Sèlma
  1. Ottoman Turkishسلمىselma(measured from records)
  2. Arabicسَلْمَىsalmā(measured from records)

From Ottoman Turkish سلمى (selma) (Turkish Selma), from Arabic سَلْمَى (salmā).

Sources 6

  • A concise dictionary of first names
  • TDK Kişi Adları Sözlüğü (official Turkish given-name dictionary)
  • Wiktionary
  • Diccionario etimológico de nombres propios
  • Förnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon

Attested across 24 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Sèlma 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.

Where Sèlma is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
BR Brazil—94,7431 in 2.2K102K——
SE Sweden—14,3941 in 70914KSelma16
US United States—9,0551 in 37K9KSelma75
NO Norway—5,7761 in 94720KSelma8
DK Denmark—3,5141 in 1.7K3.5K——
FI Finland—3,1551 in 1.8K13K—1
IS Iceland—3521 in 996352——
BA Bosnia & Herzegovina#90———Selma29

94,743 people counted by IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror), 2022. 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: IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); IBGE — Nomes (census name API); SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Sèlma is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Portuguese given name30 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Brazil, Egypt, Morocco, Israel

    Languages: Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew

    Also written Selma, Salma, סלמה, Sélma, Sélmà

2 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Evidence(measured from records)

No register attests this spelling yet

None of the official registers or reference works in our corpus lists Sèlma under this spelling. The statistics on this page rest on person records, and the related names are inferred from the name graph.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Sèlma mean, and where does it come from?
From Ottoman Turkish سلمى (selma) (Turkish Selma), from Arabic سَلْمَى (salmā). Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names and TDK Kişi Adları Sözlüğü (official Turkish given-name dictionary) and 4 other sources.
Is Sèlma a male or female name?
Sèlma is a female 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 Sèlma have the most bearers?
In Brazil, the national register counted about 95 thousand people named Sèlma, more than in any other country we hold.
Where is Sèlma most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Sèlma is densest in Sweden — about 1 in 709 people — even though Brazil holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Sèlma?
In Brazil, the national register counted 94,743 people named Sèlma in 2022, about 1 in 2.2 thousand residents.
How common is Sèlma compared with other names?
In Bosnia & Herzegovina, Sèlma is the 90th most common given name of 4,559 given names recorded there.

What do you want to know about Sèlma?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/s%C3%A8lma

The 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, “Sèlma” — the 90th most common given name in Bosnia & Herzegovina. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Sèlma parses inside a full name →