Abubakar

given name · Latin script

Meaning: Noble

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/abʲuːbakʰa/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Abubakar is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Nigeria it is the 8th most common given name.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 288K(measured from records)
  • PKPakistan≈1 in 2.1M
  • NGNigeria≈1 in 2.7M

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.

United States (measured from records)

1,155 people, 2020

Sources
198 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 27K (inferred from the name graph)

Sweden

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Noble

Sources 1

  • The book of African names

Attested across 9 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Abubakar 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.

Where Abubakar is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—1,1551 in 288K1.1KAbubakar198
SE Sweden—3801 in 27K380Abubakar21
ES Spain—2201 in 227K237—27
PK Pakistan—≈110 est.≈1 in 2.1M—Abubakar72
NG Nigeria#8≈79 est.≈1 in 2.7M—Abubakar143
FI Finland—611 in 91K84—6
DK Denmark—421 in 140K42Abubakar21
IS Iceland—41 in 88K4—1

1,155 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry). 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Abubakar is also recorded as 6 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Swahili given name3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, India, Kenya, United States

    Also written Abu-Bakar

  • Hindi given name14 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tanzania

    Languages: Hindi, Urdu

    Also written Abu-Bakar, Äbübäkär, Àbûbàkár, Ábubakar, Âbübäkâr

  • Arabic given name4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait

    Languages: Arabic, Amharic

    Also written Abu-Bakar, Ãbû-Bâkâr

  • Indonesian given name5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, Indonesia, Malaysia, India

    Languages: Indonesian, Malay

    Also written Abu-Bakar, Àbùbàkàr

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Abu-Bakar

  • Spanish given name8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, Philippines, France, United States

    Languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese

    Also written Abu-Bakar, Ãbūbākár

58 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Abubakar is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • first Khalifa after the death of

    as a nameWhats in a name = Unaitwaje a Swahili book of names

  • The first Khalifa after Prophet

    as a nameWhats in a name = Unaitwaje a Swahili book of names

  • In Cebuano, a Moro surname from Arabic

    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)

190019502000Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, b. 1912A. A. Rahim, b. 1920Abubakar Siddique, b. 1934Abubakar Rimi, b. 1940Abubakar Audu, b. 1947Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, b. 1961Bukola Saraki, b. 1962Abubakar Sani Bello, b. 1967Abubakar Shekau, b. 1973Abubakar Salim, b. 1993

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)

InformalHi Abubakar,

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 68 sources across 33 countries.

Official registers attesting Abubakar
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020201.1K#24,300
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010594#37,492
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000272#67,725
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—237#14,545
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—237#14,492
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)—71#16,706
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—23#20,497

Reference works 7

  • 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
  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
  • 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 Abubakar mean, and where does it come from?
Noble Recorded by The book of African names.
How do you pronounce Abubakar?
A machine transcription gives /abʲuːbakʰa/ (IPA) for English.
Is Abubakar a male or female name?
Abubakar 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.
What are other forms of the name Abubakar?
In the etymology graph, Ebubekir, Aboubacar and Boubacar are forms of the same name in other languages.
In which country does Abubakar have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 1.2 thousand people named Abubakar, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled abubakar.
Where is Abubakar most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Abubakar is densest in Sweden — about 1 in 27 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Abubakar?
In the United States, the national register counted 1,155 people named Abubakar in 2020, about 1 in 288 thousand residents.
How common is Abubakar compared with other names?
In Nigeria, Abubakar is the 8th most common given name of 138,191 given names recorded there.

What do you want to know about Abubakar?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/abubakar

The 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, “Abubakar” — the 8th most common given name in Nigeria. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Abubakar parses inside a full name →