Tobias

given name · Latin script

Meaning, in German: Hebrew name meaning 'goodness of Yahweh'

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

/toˈbiːas/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Tobias is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country, where it is the 52nd most common given name.

rarermore common
  • SESweden1 in 312(measured from records)
  • DEGermany≈1 in 356
  • ATAustria≈1 in 714

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.

Germany (inferred from the name graph)

≈220,000 people, est.

Sources
416 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 312 (inferred from the name graph)

Sweden

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

Locally spelled Tobías in AR Argentina.

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

from the Greek form of the Hebrew male personal name Tovya, literally 'Jehovah is good'.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 17 languages in the etymology graph.

How Tobias is read(measured from records)

Tobias is one spelling over 4 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 3 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.

  • German50%

    Hebrew name meaning 'goodness of Yahweh'.

    as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung

  • Spanish20%

    No dictionary in our sources glosses Tobias in Spanish.

  • English13%

    from the Greek form of the Hebrew male personal name Tovya, literally 'Jehovah is good'.

    as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

    Patrs.: Pol.: Tokarzewicz. Beloruss.: Tokarevich. form of the Hebr. male given name Tovya ‘Jehovah is good’, which, together with various deriv. forms, have Toke see Tooke 615 Tolbert Toop

    as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles

    The main character in the Book of Tobit, regarded as apocryphal by most Protestants (Biblical character).

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • Danish5.3%

    Tobias (biblical character)

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

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)

Tobias 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 Tobias is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
DE Germany#52≈220,000 est.≈1 in 356—Tobias320
SE Sweden#26732,7511 in 31233KTobias121
US United States—20,5581 in 16K20KTobias416
AR Argentina—≈16,000 est.≈1 in 2.9K792Tobías27
DK Denmark—15,2811 in 38415K—7
AT Austria#116≈12,000 est.≈1 in 71424KTobias145
NO Norway—11,0481 in 49542KTobias73

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; 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); Statistik Austria — STATatlas Vornamen WFS (per-name time series 1984–2024); RENAPER — Nombres de nacimientos (2012–present); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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)

Tobias is also recorded as 6 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Swedish given name12 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, United States

    Languages: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian

    Also written Tobías, Tôbïås, Tobiás, Tóbías, Tobiáš

  • Czech given name11 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, United States

    Languages: Czech, Polish, Slovak

    Also written Tobiáš, Tobiaš, Tóbiás, Tobías, Tobiás

  • French given name11 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Sweden, Switzerland

    Also written Tobías, Tobiáš, Tóbías, Tôbias, Tobiàs

  • Finnish given name4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, United States

    Languages: Finnish, Estonian

    Also written Tobías, Tobiaš

  • a separate name6 spellings in the group

    Also written Tobiaš, Tobiáš, Tobiás, Tobías, Tóbiás

  • Lao given name20 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Laos, Thailand, Sweden, United Kingdom

    Languages: Lao, Thai

    Also written Tobías, โทเบียส, โทบิอัส, Thobias, Tobiassen

73 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.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Tobias is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Portuguese, Tobit (book of the Bible)

    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)

1700180019002000Tobias Mayer, b. 1723Tobias Asser, b. 1838Tobias Moretti, b. 1959Toby Jones, b. 1966Mehmet Scholl, b. 1970Tobias Menzies, b. 1974Tobias Lindholm, b. 1977Christoph Metzelder, b. 1980Tobias Santelmann, b. 1980Toby Regbo, b. 1991

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)

InformalHallo Tobias,Hi Tobias, (English)

A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 123 sources across 58 countries.

Official registers attesting Tobias
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—42K#77
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—33K#130
AT AustriaStatistik Austria — STATatlas Vornamen WFS (per-name time series 1984–2024)202424K#12
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)202022K—
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202020K#1,574
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—15K#50
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)202511K—
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)20251.2K—
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Nombres de nacimientos (2012–present)2024792#179
AT AustriaStatistik Austria — Vornamen der Geborenen (1984–present)2024430#12
AR Argentinadatos.gob.ar — nombres.datos.gob.ar per-name lookup (1922–2015)2015342—
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — births 1922–2015 (Kaggle mirror)2015340—

Reference works 8

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

Is Tobias a male or female name?
Tobias 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.
Where does the name Tobias come from?
from the Greek form of the Hebrew male personal name Tovya, literally 'Jehovah is good'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does Tobias have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 225 thousand people named Tobias in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled tobias.
Where is Tobias most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Tobias is densest in Sweden — about 1 in 312 people — even though Germany holds more of our records for it.
What does the name Tobias mean?
In German, Hebrew name meaning 'goodness of Yahweh'.
How do you pronounce Tobias?
A machine transcription gives /toˈbiːas/ (IPA) for German.
What are other forms of the name Tobias?
In the etymology graph, Toby, Topi and Tovia are forms of the same name in other languages.
How common is the name Tobias?
In Sweden, the national register counted 32,751 people named Tobias, about 1 in 312 residents.
How common is Tobias compared with other names?
In Germany, Tobias is the 52nd most common given name of 156,202 given names recorded there.

What do you want to know about Tobias?

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

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, “Tobias” — the 52nd most common given name in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Tobias parses inside a full name →