Björn

given name · Latin script

Meaning, in Swedish: a bear (an ursid)

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

Björn is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Sweden than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • SESweden1 in 164(measured from records)
  • DEGermany≈1 in 1.6K
  • BEBelgium≈1 in 2.1K

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.

Sweden (measured from records)

62,354 people

Sources
303 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 164 (inferred from the name graph)

Sweden

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Bjorn in SE Sweden, NL Netherlands, BE Belgium 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)

a bear (an ursid)

Sources 1

  • kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Attested across 25 languages in the etymology graph.

How Björn is read(measured from records)

Björn 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.

  • German72%

    in den 1930er-Jahren entlehnter männl.

    as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen

  • Swedish21%

    a bear (an ursid)

    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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)

Björn 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 Björn is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
SE Sweden#33162,3541 in 16462KBjorn75
DE Germany#269≈50,000 est.≈1 in 1.6K2Björn176
BJ Benin#172≈9,000 est.≈1 in 1.4K—Björn6
NL Netherlands#2345,6761 in 3K5.7KBjorn110
BE Belgium#325≈5,600 est.≈1 in 2.1K4Bjorn119
NO Norway#792≈3,300 est.≈1 in 1.7K74Bjorn62
IS Iceland—1,6981 in 2071.8K—1

62,354 people counted by Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population), counting the spelling björn. 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: the de-leipzig-vornamen register; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry); Hagstofa Íslands — Given-name frequency by population (2005); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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)

Björn is also recorded as 5 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate name5 spellings in the group

    Also written Bjőrn, Bjorn, BjO̸rn, Bjo̷rn

  • Spanish given name9 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, Spain, United States, Philippines

    Languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese

    Also written Bjorn, B-Jorn

  • a separate given name8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands

    Also written Bjorn, Bjòrn, BjO̸rn, Bjôrn, Bjõrn

  • Croatian given name22 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Croatia, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden

    Languages: Croatian, Bulgarian, Serbian

    Also written Bjorn, Bjørn, Bjõrn, Бьорн, BjO̸rn

  • Russian given name23 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Russia, Norway, Sweden, Türkiye

    Languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian

    Also written Бьёрн, Bjorn, Бьорн, Бьерн, Bjørn

36 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)

Björn is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Icelandic, bear (mammal)

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

  • Swedish: from an Old Norse byname meaning ‘bear’. It is also in part a short form of compound names such as ARNBJÖRN and TORBJÖRN . Cognates: Norwegian: Bjørn, Bjarne .

    as a word

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)

19201940196019802000Björn Engholm, b. 1939Björn Nordqvist, b. 1942Björn Ulvaeus, b. 1945Björn Andersson, b. 1951Björn Andrésen, b. 1955Björn Borg, b. 1956Björn Kuipers, b. 1973Björn Hlynur Haraldsson, b. 1974Björn Gustafsson, b. 1986Björn Engels, b. 1994

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 39 sources across 18 countries.

Official registers attesting Björn
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—62K#56
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)199940K—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)200040K—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)200140K—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)200239K—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)200339K—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)200439K—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)200539K—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)200638K—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)200738K—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)200838K—
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)200938K—

Reference works 3

  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname 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 Björn mean, and where does it come from?
a bear (an ursid) Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
Is Björn a male or female name?
Björn 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.
What are other forms of the name Björn?
In the etymology graph, Bjoern, Torbjörn and Bjarke are forms of the same name in other languages; Bjarne, Bjarni and Björne are recorded short or pet forms.
In which country does Björn have the most bearers?
In Sweden, the national register counted about 62 thousand people named Björn, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bjorn.
Where is Björn most common?
Björn is densest in Sweden, where the national register counts about 1 in 164 people carrying it.
How common is the name Björn?
In Sweden, the national register counted 62,354 people named Björn, about 1 in 164 residents.
How common is Björn compared with other names?
In Sweden, Björn is the 331st most common given name of 45,482 given names recorded there.

What do you want to know about Björn?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/bj%C3%B6rn

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, “Björn” — the 331st most common given name in Sweden. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Björn parses inside a full name →