Imam
given name · Latin script
Meaning: status name from Arabic imam, literally ‘one who leads the way’, an honorific title for one who leads prayers in a mosque, also applied to the founders of Islamic law schools
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/imam/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Imam is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Bangladesh than in any other country.
- BDBangladesh≈1 in 2.1K(inferred from the name graph)
- NGNigeria≈1 in 11K
- PKPakistan≈1 in 20K
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.
- Bangladesh (inferred from the name graph)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 244 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.1K (inferred from the name graph)
≈76,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Bangladesh, 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)
status name from Arabic imam, literally ‘one who leads the way’, an honorific title for one who leads prayers in a mosque, also applied to the founders of Islamic law schools. Among Shiite Muslims the title imam is appHed to the spiritual leaders descended from Fatima, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, and her husband Ali, the fourth and last of the ‘rightly guided’ khalifs (see Ali).
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Imam 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BD Bangladesh | #253 | ≈76,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.1K | listed | Imam | 94 |
| NG Nigeria | — | ≈20,000 est. | ≈1 in 11K | listed | Imam | 60 |
| PK Pakistan | #383 | ≈12,000 est. | ≈1 in 20K | 3 | Imam | 70 |
| TR Türkiye | — | ≈9,200 est. | ≈1 in 8.9K | — | Imam | 20 |
| AF Afghanistan | — | ≈5,500 est. | ≈1 in 6.6K | — | Imam | 7 |
| AE United Arab Emirates | — | ≈970 est. | ≈1 in 10K | — | Imam | 59 |
| US United States | — | 251 | 1 in 1.3M | 1.4K | Imam | 244 |
| QA Qatar | #745 | ≈230 est. | ≈1 in 11K | — | Imam | 28 |
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: Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) — Form-33 List of Contesting Candidates, 2018 General Election; the ng-naijafaker register; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020. 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)
Imam 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.
‘Leader’. For Sunnis this can denote any pious Muslim who leads prayers in a mosque, but for Shiites it refers specifically to the descendants of ‘Ali and Fatima, whom they regard as the only true successors of Muhammad.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, One who leads the salat prayers in a mosque.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Turkish, 1. En önde bulunan, önder. 2. Namazda kendisine uyulan kimse. 3. Müslümanlıkta mezhep kuran kimse. 4. Halife olan kimse.
as a wordTDK Kişi Adları Sözlüğü (official Turkish given-name dictionary)
In Arabic, leader; chief of communal prayer
as a nameA Dictionary of Muslim Names
In Arabic, prayer leader; used as a personal name
as a nameAfrican Muslim 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)
- Sütçü İmamb. 1871TRTurkish resistance leader
- İmam Hüseyin İncioğlub. 1920TRTurkish statesperson (1920–2009)
- İmam Hüseyin Filizb. 1950TRTurkish statesperson (born 1950)
- İmam Taşçıerb. 1959TRTurkish statesperson (born 1959)
- İmam Aydemirb. 1971TRTurkish association football player (born 1971)
- Imam Toharib. 1976IDIndonesian badminton player
- İmam Şamil Yetikb. 1978TRTurkish professor of engineering (born 1978)
- Imam Sodikinb. 1980IDIndonesian badminton player
- Imam Abubakar Idrisb. 1987NGuniversity lecturer
- Imam-ul-Haqb. 1995PKPakistani cricketer
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)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 53 sources across 29 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 215 | #33,126 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 36 | #33,126 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2017 | 5 | — |
| NG Nigeria | naija-faker — Nigerian Given Names by Ethnicity (Hausa/Igbo/Yoruba) | — | — | — |
| NG Nigeria | Nigerian names by ethnicity (naijafaker, MIT) | — | — | — |
| PK Pakistan | Muslim given names (CC0) | — | — | — |
Reference works 7
- 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 surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- 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 Imam mean, and where does it come from?
- status name from Arabic imam, literally ‘one who leads the way’, an honorific title for one who leads prayers in a mosque, also applied to the founders of Islamic law schools. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Imam?
- A machine transcription gives /imam/ (IPA) for Indonesian.
- Is Imam a male or female name?
- Imam 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 Imam?
- In the etymology graph, Imamu is a form of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Imam have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 76 thousand people named Imam in Bangladesh, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled imam.
- How common is the name Imam?
- In the United States, the national register counted 251 people named Imam in 2020, about 1 in 1.3 million residents.
- How common is Imam compared with other names?
- In Bangladesh, Imam is the 253rd most common given name of 29,323 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Imam?
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/imamThe 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, “Imam” — the 253rd most common given name in Bangladesh. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.