Lilja
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Swedish: ornamental name from Swedish lilja ‘lily’
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈɫiɫjə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Lilja is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Finland than in any other country.
- ISIceland1 in 253(measured from records)
- FIFinland1 in 561
- NONorway1 in 6.8K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Finland (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 54 (measured from records)
- 1 in 253 (inferred from the name graph)
9,931 people
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Iceland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Лилья in FI Finland.
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)
ornamental name from Swedish lilja ‘lily’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 14 languages in the etymology graph.
How Lilja is read(measured from records)
Lilja is one spelling over 3 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.
- English44%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Lilja in English.
- Swedish21%
ornamental name from Swedish lilja ‘lily’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
Namnet Lilja är lika med växtbenämningen lilja och motsvarar engelska lily, → Lilly som är ett populärt namn idag. I den finlandssvenska almanackan 20 maj.
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
- Finnish18%
lily (flower)
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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)
Lilja 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FI Finland | 9,931 | 1 in 561 | 15K | Лилья | 4 |
| IS Iceland | 1,389 | 1 in 253 | 1.4K | — | — |
| NO Norway | 808 | 1 in 6.8K | 2.5K | — | 2 |
| DK Denmark | 463 | 1 in 13K | 463 | — | — |
| US United States | 247 | 1 in 1.3M | 820 | Lilja | 19 |
| NL Netherlands | 24 | 1 in 720K | 24 | — | 1 |
9,931 people counted by DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register), counting the spelling lilja. 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: DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry); Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018). 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)
Lilja is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Icelandic, lily
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In German, weibl. Vom. zu schwed. lilja »Lilie«.
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
In Norwegian Bokmål, definite feminine singular of lilje
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)
- Gertrud Liljab. 1887SESwedish writer
- Lars Liljab. 1954SESwedish politician
- Efva Liljab. 1956SESwedish choreographer
- George Liljab. 1958USplayer of American football
- James Liljab. 1966USAmerican musician
- Andreas Liljab. 1975SESwedish ice hockey player and coach
- Max Liljab. 1975FIFinnish cellist
- Ryan Liljab. 1981USplayer of American football
- Jakob Liljab. 1993SESwedish ice hockey player
- Kim Liljab. 1994SESwedish ice hockey 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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 51 sources across 20 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 15K | #149 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register) | — | 9.9K | — |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 5.1K | #363 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 2.5K | #926 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Sukunimitilasto (Finnish surnames register) | — | 2.4K | — |
| IS Iceland | Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry) | 2026 | 1.4K | — |
| IS Iceland | Hagstofa — population register names 2023 | 2023 | 1.4K | #16 |
| IS Iceland | Hagstofa Íslands — Given-name frequency by population (2005) | 2005 | 1.2K | #20 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 820 | #28,967 |
| NO Norway | SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891) | 2025 | 808 | — |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 796 | #31,209 |
| NO Norway | SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891) | 2024 | 791 | — |
Reference works 6
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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
- Søndergaard, Georg, Danske efternavne (Lademann 1984/1991)
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
- How do you pronounce Lilja?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈɫiɫjə/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Lilja mean, and where does it come from?
- ornamental name from Swedish lilja ‘lily’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- What are other forms of the name Lilja?
- In the etymology graph, Lilien and Lileas are forms of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Lilja have the most bearers?
- In Finland, the national register counted about 9.9 thousand people named Lilja, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled лилья.
- Where is Lilja most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Lilja is densest in Iceland — about 1 in 253 people — even though Finland holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Lilja?
- In Finland, the national register counted 9,931 people named Lilja, about 1 in 561 residents.
What do you want to know about Lilja?
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/liljaThe 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, “Lilja”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.