Nayak
surname · Latin script
Meaning: variant of Naik
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 16 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Nayak is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country, where it is the 76th most common surname.
- SGSingapore≈1 in 27Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- IDIndonesia≈1 in 36Kfew records
- MYMalaysia≈1 in 51Kfew records
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Nayak itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- India (measured from records)
- #433 (measured from records)
- 7 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 292 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 15K (inferred from the name graph)
413,144 named Nayaka
of 19M surnames, spellings grouped
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Angola, 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)variant of Naik.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Nayak 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | #76 | 413,144as Nayaka | 1 in 3.2K | 413K | Nayak | 292 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈7,400 est. | ≈1 in 36K | listed | Nayak | 20 |
| AO Angola | — | ≈2,100 est. | ≈1 in 15K | — | Nayak | 4 |
| US United States | — | 1,930 | 1 in 172K | 3.3K | Nayak | 288 |
| DZ Algeria | — | ≈990 est. | ≈1 in 44K | — | Nayak | 4 |
| SG Singapore | — | ≈230 est. | ≈1 in 27K | — | Nayak | 31 |
| GD Grenada | — | 43as Nyack | 1 in 2.6K | 43 | — | — |
413,144 people counted by Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls, counting the spelling nayaka. 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: Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025. 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)Nayak is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, A member of a Muslim Rajput community in the state of Gujarat in India.
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)- Niladri Nayakb. 1943INpolitician from Odisha, India
- Ghanashyam Nayakb. 1945INIndian Actor (1945–2021)
- Nina Nayakb. 1953INIndian politician
- Suresh Nayakb. 1969INPh.D. Purdue University 1998
- Anoop Nayakb. 1969British academic
- Satyarth Nayakb. 1981INIndian writer
- Apeksha Nayakb. 1999INbadminton player
- Krishna S NayakUSresearcher
- Richi NayakAUresearcher
- Ashwin NayakUSPh.D. University of California, Berkeley 1999
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)30 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 16 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 121K | #166 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 14K | #113 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 3.3K | #9,550 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.9K | #15,238 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 936 | #24,929 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- 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
- 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 Nayak mean, and where does it come from?
- variant of Naik. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Nayak have the most bearers?
- In India, the national register counted about 413 thousand people named Nayaka, more than in any other country we hold.
- How common is the name Nayak?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,930 people named Nayak in 2010, about 1 in 172 thousand residents.
- How common is Nayak compared with other names?
- In India, Nayak is the 76th most common surname of 1,492,515 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Nayak?
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/nayakThe 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, “Nayak” — the 76th most common surname in India. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.