Yahya
given name · Latin script
Meaning: to live; will live. A prophet; the biblical John
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/jahja/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Yahya is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Morocco than in any other country, where it is the 93rd most common given name.
- SYSyria≈1 in 651(inferred from the name graph)
- MAMorocco≈1 in 695
- YEYemen≈1 in 1.3K
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.
- Morocco (inferred from the name graph)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 228 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 651 (inferred from the name graph)
≈51,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Syria, 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)
to live; will live. A prophet; the biblical John
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of Muslim Names
Attested across 15 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Yahya 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MA Morocco | #93 | ≈51,000 est. | ≈1 in 695 | — | Yahya | 112 |
| TR Türkiye | #291 | ≈50,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.7K | — | Yahya | 92 |
| NG Nigeria | — | ≈31,000 est. | ≈1 in 7K | — | Yahya | 38 |
| SY Syria | #67 | ≈30,000 est. | ≈1 in 651 | — | Yahya | 43 |
| SA Saudi Arabia | #118 | ≈26,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | — | Yahya | 145 |
| YE Yemen | #97 | ≈23,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | — | Yahya | 70 |
| ES Spain | — | 4,754 | 1 in 11K | 4.8K | Yahya | 61 |
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: INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos). 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)
Yahya 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 Arabic, a Prophet, the biblical John, son of Prophet
as a nameA Dictionary of Muslim Names
Swahili/Arabic: God's gift; also Arabic form of John the Baptist, meaning living.
as a nameAfrican Names
In Arabic, Arabic form of John; the Qur'anic prophet Yahya.
as a nameAfrican Muslim Names
In Arabic, he lives; Qur'anic name of John the Baptist
as a nameAfrican Muslim Names
In Arabic, Yahya; John the Baptist, Qur'anic prophet.
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)
- Yahya of Antiochb. 980Melkite Christian physician
- Mohammad Abu Zakariya Yahyab. 1203MAHafsid sultan of Tunis (1203-1249)
- Al-Nawawib. 1233SYnot in their usual nameSunni Shafi'ite jurist and hadith scholar (1233–1277)
- Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Dinb. 1869YEImam (1869–1948)
- Yahya Sinwarb. 1962PSPalestinian politician and Hamas leader (1962–2024)
- Yahya Jammehb. 1965GM2nd President of the Gambia
- Yahya Ayyashb. 1966PSPalestinian electrical and explosives engineer (1966-1996)
- Yahya Abdul-Mateen IIb. 1986USAmerican actor
- Yahya Al-Shehrib. 1990SASaudi Arabian footballer
- Yahia Attiyat Allahb. 1995MAnot in their usual nameMoroccan footballer
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)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 95 sources across 49 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 4.8K | #915 |
| ES Spain | INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 3.6K | #502 |
Reference works 7
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Тахиров, Речник на турските лични имена в България
- 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 Yahya mean, and where does it come from?
- to live; will live. A prophet; the biblical John Recorded by A Dictionary of Muslim Names.
- How do you pronounce Yahya?
- A machine transcription gives /jahja/ (IPA) for Turkish.
- What are other forms of the name Yahya?
- In the etymology graph, John, Juan and Ivan are forms of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Yahya have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 51 thousand people named Yahya in Morocco, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled yahya.
- Is Yahya a male or female name?
- Yahya 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.
- How common is the name Yahya?
- In Spain, the national register counted 4,754 people named Yahya, about 1 in 11 thousand residents.
- How common is Yahya compared with other names?
- In Morocco, Yahya is the 93rd most common given name of 41,711 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Yahya?
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/yahyaThe 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, “Yahya” — the 93rd most common given name in Morocco. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.