Names of Singapore SG
The names that most distinguish Singapore from the rest of the world are Tan, Lim and Goh; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Singapore are James and Tan.
Written in English, Malay, Chinese, Tamil.
- Population
- 6.2M
- Name forms recorded
- 47K
At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.
The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.
How names work in Singapore
6 naming traditions are in use in Singapore, 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 Singapore
| # | Name | Estimated bearers | How common |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | James | — | — |
| 3 | Robert | — | — |
| 4 | William | — | — |
| 5 | Charles | — | — |
| 6 | Lee | — | — |
| 7 | Linda | — | — |
| 10 | Donald | — | — |
| 11 | Kenneth | — | — |
| 12 | Lynn | — | — |
| 13 | Karen | — | — |
| 14 | Barbara | — | — |
| 15 | Michelle | — | — |
| 16 | Jason | — | — |
| 19 | Gary | — | — |
| 20 | Ronald | — | — |
| 21 | Jeffrey | — | — |
| 22 | Sharon | — | — |
| 23 | Larry | — | — |
| 24 | Donna | — | — |
| 25 | Betty | — | — |
No official register
Characteristic of Singapore
Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Singapore 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
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
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.
- "What's in a name?"web
- Chinese nameencyclopaedia
- Hong Kong – Naming, Cultural Atlasweb
- Hongkonger nameencyclopaedia
- Indian nameencyclopaedia
- Indonesianweb
- Indonesian namesencyclopaedia
- Jyutpingencyclopaedia
- Malaysianweb
- Malaysian namesencyclopaedia
- Marga (Batak)encyclopaedia
- Minangkabau peopleencyclopaedia
- Naming Conventions of Sri Lankaweb
- Sri Lankanweb
- Tamil honorificsencyclopaedia
- Tamil nameencyclopaedia
- Why Malaysian Muslims have 'bin' or 'binti'web
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
- Is there an official list of the most common names in Singapore?
- We have not found one at an authority tier we would publish. The ranking on this page comes from our own record corpus and is labelled as such. If a register exists, we would like to hear about it.
- Is there one naming system in Singapore?
- No — 6 are described on this page (Chinese, Indonesian and Malay, Tamil and South Indian, British, Javanese, Cantonese and Hong Kong), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.
Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Singapore”, https://mondonomo.ai/names/SG (data snapshot 2026-10-09).