Hussein
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Hussein is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Tanzania than in any other country. In Yemen it is the 31st most common given name. Recorded meaning: From the Arabic male personal name Husayn, literally ‘little Hasan’; a name meaning ‘good, handsome’.
- TZTanzania≈1 in 528(inferred from the name graph)
- LBLebanon≈1 in 727
- JOJordan≈1 in 959
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.
- Tanzania (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 291 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 528 (inferred from the name graph)
≈110,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Tanzania, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
From the Arabic male personal name Husayn, literally ‘little Hasan’; a name meaning ‘good, handsome’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Hussein 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TZ Tanzania | #326 | ≈110,000 est. | ≈1 in 528 | 7 | Hussein | 39 |
| EG Egypt | #170 | ≈79,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | listed | Hussein | 185 |
| NG Nigeria | — | ≈19,000 est. | ≈1 in 11K | — | Hussein | 58 |
| SA Saudi Arabia | #237 | ≈16,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.1K | — | Hussein | 140 |
| YE Yemen | #31 | ≈15,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.1K | — | Hussein | 60 |
| JO Jordan | #176 | ≈11,000 est. | ≈1 in 959 | — | Hussein | 108 |
| SE Sweden | — | 9,440 | 1 in 1.1K | 9.4K | Hussein | 66 |
| LB Lebanon | #138 | ≈7,500 est. | ≈1 in 727 | — | Hussein | 115 |
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: Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); INEC Special Gazette 2021 — 2020 parliamentary election results. 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)
Hussein 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 English, A male given name from Arabic: alternative spelling of Husayn.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Swedish, Hussein (m.fl. former) har arabiskt ursprung och är från början en diminutivform till → Hassan. En känd namnbärare är förre amerikanske presidenten Barack Hussein Obama (f. 1961). Hussein är ett mycket populärt namn bland muslimer. Ett av profeten Muhammeds barnbarn bar namnet.
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
In English, Ibrahim, Kenyan marathoner;
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, Jordanian king; Saddam,
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, president, Iraq
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
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)
- Husayn ibn Alib. 626SAnot in their usual namegrandson of Muhammad and the 3rd Shia Imam (626–680)
- Avicennab. 980UZnot in their usual namePersian polymath, physician and philosopher (c. 980–1037)
- Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardyb. 1892PKnot in their usual nameBengali barrister and politician (1892–1963)
- Hussein el-Shafeib. 1918EGEgyptian revolutionary and politician (1918–2005)
- Hussain Muhammad Ershadb. 1930BDnot in their usual namePresident of Bangladesh from 1983 to 1990 Former (6th) Army chief of Bangladesh
- Barack Obamab. 1934KEnot in their usual nameeconomist and father of Barack Obama Jr. (1934–1982)
- Hussein I of Jordanb. 1935JOKing of Jordan from 1952 to 1999
- Hissène Habréb. 1942TDnot in their usual name5th president of Chad
- Barack Obamab. 1961USnot in their usual name44th President of the United States (2009–2017)
- Ahmed al-Sharaab. 1982SYnot in their usual namePresident of Syria since 2025
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 97 sources across 49 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 9.4K | #414 |
| SE Sweden | SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023) | 2020 | 3.3K | — |
| TZ Tanzania | INEC Special Gazette 2021 — 2020 parliamentary election results | 2020 | 7 | #23 |
Reference works 9
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Ethiopian name tokens (GitHub lehagere/ethiopian-names, 40/60 condominium list)
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 Hussein mean, and where does it come from?
- From the Arabic male personal name Husayn, literally ‘little Hasan’; a name meaning ‘good, handsome’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Hussein have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 111 thousand people named Hussein in Tanzania, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled hussein.
- Is Hussein a male or female name?
- Hussein 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 Hussein?
- In the etymology graph, Hasan, Hüseyin and Alassane are forms of the same name in other languages.
- How common is the name Hussein?
- In Sweden, the national register counted 9,440 people named Hussein, about 1 in 1.1 thousand residents.
- How common is Hussein compared with other names?
- In Tanzania, Hussein is the 326th most common given name of 37,285 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Hussein?
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/husseinThe same 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), and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Hussein” — the 326th most common given name in Tanzania. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.