Lív
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Lív is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Norway than in any other country, where it is the 85th most common given name. Recorded meaning: From Old Norse líf, from Proto-Germanic *lībą (“life, body”), from Proto-Germanic *lībaną (“to remain, stay, be left”), from Proto-Indo-European *leyp- (“to stick, glue”).
- NONorway1 in 269(measured from records)
- SESweden1 in 949
- DKDenmark1 in 1.1K
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.
- Norway (measured from records)
- Sources
- 193 (measured from records)
- 1 in 269 (inferred from the name graph)
20,317 people, 2025
Highest-authority source
Norway
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Liv in NO Norway, SE Sweden, US United States and 3 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)
- Old Norselíf(measured from records)
- Proto-Germanic*lībą“life“life, body”(measured from records)
- Proto-Germanic*lībaną“to remain“to remain, stay, be left”(measured from records)
- Proto-Indo-European*leyp-“to stick“to stick, glue”(measured from records)
From Old Norse líf, from Proto-Germanic *lībą (“life, body”), from Proto-Germanic *lībaną (“to remain, stay, be left”), from Proto-Indo-European *leyp- (“to stick, glue”).
Sources 2
Attested across 21 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Lív 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NO Norway | #85 | 20,317 | 1 in 269 | 55K | Liv | 114 |
| SE Sweden | #465 | 10,754 | 1 in 949 | 11K | Liv | 53 |
| US United States | — | 5,162 | 1 in 64K | 5.1K | Liv | 193 |
| DK Denmark | #443 | 5,132 | 1 in 1.1K | 5.1K | Liv | 111 |
| CN China | — | ≈4,800 est. | ≈1 in 291K | — | Liv | 12 |
| KH Cambodia | — | ≈940 est. | ≈1 in 18K | — | Liv | 17 |
| FI Finland | — | 303 | 1 in 18K | 400 | — | 3 |
20,317 people counted by SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891), 2025. 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: 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); Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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)
Lív 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 Hungarian, Livonian (of or pertaining to Livonia, its people or language)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Faroese, life
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)
- Lív Næsb. 1988FOFaroese singer
- Lív Argeb. 1997FOFaroese association football player
- Lív Sveinbjørnsdóttir Poulsenb. 2001FOFaroese handball player
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 9 sources across 5 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 38 | #3,172 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 4 | #47,442 |
Reference works 2
- 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 Lív mean, and where does it come from?
- From Old Norse líf, from Proto-Germanic *lībą (“life, body”), from Proto-Germanic *lībaną (“to remain, stay, be left”), from Proto-Indo-European *leyp- (“to stick, glue”). Recorded by Wiktionary and Nordic Names.
- Is Lív a male or female name?
- Lív 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.
- In which country does Lív have the most bearers?
- In Norway, the national register counted about 20 thousand people named Lív, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled liv.
- Where is Lív most common?
- Lív is densest in Norway, where the national register counts about 1 in 269 people carrying it.
- How common is the name Lív?
- In Norway, the national register counted 20,317 people named Lív in 2025, about 1 in 269 residents.
- How common is Lív compared with other names?
- In Norway, Lív is the 85th most common given name of 25,788 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Lív?
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/l%C3%ADvThe 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, “Lív” — the 85th most common given name in Norway. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.