Names of Canada

CA

The names that most distinguish Canada from the rest of the world are John, Robert and Steven; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Canada are John and Smith.

Written in English, French.

Population
38M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
239K
BBuilt from 1 official register, 1 sub-national, 239,274 name forms in our corpus.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of Canada are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Canada included.

Canadian girl and boy names

The commonest girls’ and boys’ names in our records for Canada, in order. No register here publishes names by sex, so each name’s sex comes from the registers of countries that do. A name given to both, or to girls in one country and boys in another, is left out unless a register in a country sharing Canada’s language settles it.

How names work in Canada

2 naming traditions are in use in Canada, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.

The most common names in Canada

Characteristic of Canada

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Canada holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.

DiegoShawneeRedEastJohnRobertStevenDavidJamesMichaelTheViewWilliamAngelesLindaRichardSusanJenniferDianeBrian
Sized by how much of the difference between Canada's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.(measured from records)

Scripts & spelling

Incsurname(measured from records)
Hamiltonsurname(measured from records)
Johngiven name(measured from records)
Miltonsurname(measured from records)
Newtonsurname(measured from records)
The best-attested names in Canada, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

Countries whose names look alike

Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.

Registers & sources

Official registers

Sub-national registers

1 register for Canada publishes regional lists only (Statistics Canada — First names at birth by sex at birth (Table 17-10-0147-01)). A regional list is not a national one, and summing regions would be an aggregate the publisher never made, so no figure on this page comes from them.

About this data

Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.

Data snapshot: 2026-10-12.

Questions

Is there one naming system in Canada?
No — 2 are described on this page (British, French), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Canada”, https://mondonomo.ai/names/CA (data snapshot 2026-10-12).