Svetlana
given name · Latin script
Meaning: A female given name, common in Slavic nations in which Orthodox Christianity is established
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Svetlana is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Russia than in any other country, where it is the 11th most common given name.
- LVLatvia1 in 104(measured from records)
- UZUzbekistan≈1 in 485
- RURussia≈1 in 49as Светлана
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 Svetlana 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.
- Russia (inferred from the name graph)
- #26 (measured from records)
- 7 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 302 (measured from records)
- 1 in 65 (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,900,000 named Светлана, est.
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Moldova
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Светлана in RU Russia, KZ Kazakhstan, BY Belarus and 1 more, סבטלנה in MD Moldova, LV Latvia and Світлана in UA Ukraine.
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)
A female given name, common in Slavic nations in which Orthodox Christianity is established.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 17 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Svetlana 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RU Russia | #11 | ≈2,900,000 est. | ≈1 in 49 | #11 | Светлана | 272 |
| UA Ukraine | #16 | ≈770,000 est. | ≈1 in 57 | listed | Світлана | 150 |
| BY Belarus | #10 | ≈160,000 est. | ≈1 in 59 | 106 | Светлана | 67 |
| KZ Kazakhstan | #9 | ≈120,000 est. | ≈1 in 161 | 11K | Светлана | 78 |
| UZ Uzbekistan | #30 | ≈63,000 est. | ≈1 in 485 | — | Светлана | 32 |
| MD Moldova | #44 | 51,902 | 1 in 65 | 52K | סבטלנה | 41 |
| LV Latvia | #22 | 18,013 | 1 in 104 | 18K | סבטלנה | 77 |
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: Bureau of National Statistics — birth registrations; Universal Dependencies Belarusian-HSE Corpus — Person Names (UD_Belarusian-HSE); e-services.md — living population register; PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register). 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)
Svetlana 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 Swedish, Svetlana är ett slaviskt namn, från ett ord som betyder ’ljus, blond’. En känd namnbärare är den belarusiska Nobelpristagaren Svetlana Aleksijevitj (f. 1948).
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
In English, Svizzera [Switzerland]
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, republic, Europe
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Swedish, Se Lana.
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
Luminosa
as a nameIl grande libro dei nomi per bebè. Significato, origini, curiosità. Oltre 7000 nomi per bambine e bambini Significato,…
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)
- Svetlana Alliluyevab. 1926RUJoseph Stalin's daughter (1926–2011)
- Svetlana Gerasimenkob. 1945TJUkrainian soviet and Tajik astronomer
- Lana Woodb. 1946USnot in their usual nameAmerican actress
- Svetlana Savitskayab. 1948RUSoviet cosmonaut
- Svetlana Alexievichb. 1948BYBelarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer (born 1948)
- Cecab. 1973RSnot in their usual nameSerbian singer
- Sviatlana Tsikhanouskayab. 1982BYnot in their usual nameBelarusian politician, educator, and pro-democracy activist (born 1982)
- Svitlana Lobodab. 1982UAUkrainian singer-songwriter
- Svetlana Kuznetsovab. 1985RURussian tennis player
- Svetlana Ivanovab. 1985RURussian actress
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 79 sources across 38 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MD Moldova | e-services.md — living population register | — | 52K | #15 |
| LV Latvia | PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register) | — | 18K | — |
| LV Latvia | PMLP — Personvārdu meklētājs (per-name population-register lookup) | — | 18K | #8 |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- 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
- What does the name Svetlana mean, and where does it come from?
- A female given name, common in Slavic nations in which Orthodox Christianity is established. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- What are other forms of the name Svetlana?
- In the etymology graph, Lana and Svjetlana are forms of the same name in other languages; Sveta is a recorded short or pet form.
- In which country does Svetlana have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.9 million people named Светлана in Russia, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Svetlana most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Svetlana is densest in Moldova — about 1 in 65 people — even though Russia holds more of our records for it.
- Is Svetlana a male or female name?
- Svetlana 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.
- How common is the name Svetlana?
- In Moldova, the national register counted 51,902 people named Svetlana, about 1 in 65 residents.
- How common is Svetlana compared with other names?
- In Russia, Svetlana is the 11th most common given name of 472,143 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Svetlana?
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/svetlanaThe 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, “Svetlana” — the 11th most common given name in Russia. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.