Names of Palestine PS
Palestine — Birth Names in the West Bank 2011 (PCBS) records ليان as the commonest given name in Palestine; the names that most distinguish Palestine from the rest of the world are غزل, عائشة and ناديا.
Written in Arabic.
- Population
- 4.8M
- Official registers
- 1
- Name forms recorded
- 9.1K
At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.
How names work in Palestine
Names in Palestine follow one naming tradition. Its structure, its given-name and surname stock, how to address someone and what trips software up are set out on its own page.
The most common names in Palestine
| # | Name | Bearers recorded | Our rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ليان | 964 | — |
| 2 | جنى | 885 | — |
| 3 | ريماس | 801 | — |
| 4 | حال | 771 | — |
| 5 | لين | 720 | — |
| 6 | رهف | 665 | 92 |
| 7 | سارة | 544 | — |
| 8 | بيسان | 516 | — |
| 9 | غزل | 484 | 12 |
| 10 | اية | 452 | — |
| 11 | سديل | 431 | — |
| 12 | مريم | 423 | 2 |
| 13 | نور | 407 | 41 |
| 14 | غنى | 402 | — |
| 15 | تالة | 378 | — |
| 16 | ملك | 375 | — |
| 17 | ميار | 363 | — |
| 18 | لجين | 344 | — |
| 19 | زينة | 342 | — |
| 20 | راما | 331 | — |
Where the two lists disagree
25 of Palestine — Birth Names in the West Bank 2011 (PCBS)'s top 25 given names sit five or more places away in our record corpus. Neither ranking is wrong; they count different people.
The register counts one population in one year — everyone it enumerates, once. Our corpus counts records: historical registers going back decades, the diaspora, business and place records, and several generations of births. A name that was common two generations ago outranks a name common today; a name whose spelling scatters across sources (diacritics dropped, transliterated differently) loses ground, because only its dominant spelling is ranked.
Characteristic of Palestine
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Palestine 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.
Scripts & spelling
Names in Palestine are written in Arabic (97%) and Latin (3%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.
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
- Palestine — Birth Names in the West Bank 2011 (PCBS)2011headline (given)
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) counts newborns: 211 given-name forms for 2011, licence Open government data. Last verified 2026-07-02.
Cited works
Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.
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: 2026-10-09.
Questions
- What is the most common given name in Palestine?
- محمد, according to Palestine — Birth Names in the West Bank 2011 (PCBS) (2011), with 4,464 bearers recorded among boys.
- Why do sources disagree about the commonest name in Palestine?
- Because they count different people. Palestine — Birth Names in the West Bank 2011 (PCBS) (2011) counts one population once, and its commonest given name is محمد. Our corpus counts every record we hold — historical registers, the diaspora, decades of births — and its commonest is إيمان. Both are on this page, each with its denominator.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Palestine”, https://mondonomo.ai/names/PS (data snapshot 2026-10-09). Official figures from Palestine — Birth Names in the West Bank 2011 (PCBS).