Alex

given name · Latin script

Meaning, in English: A unisex given name from Ancient Greek

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

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

Alex is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Russia than in any other country, where it is the 5th most common given name.

rarermore common
  • ECEcuador1 in 251(measured from records)
  • BRBrazil1 in 719
  • USUnited States1 in 891

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Alex itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

Russia (inferred from the name graph)

≈3,200,000 named Алексей, est.

#11 (measured from records)

of 15M given names

8 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
667 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 251 (inferred from the name graph)

Ecuador

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

AlexLatin(measured from records)
АлексейCyrillic(measured from records)
אלכסייHebrew(measured from records)
ალექსიGeorgian(measured from records)
ԱլեքսArmenian(measured from records)
ΑλεξGreek(measured from records)
อเล็กซิสThai(measured from records)
알렉세이Hangul(measured from records)

7 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Алексей in RU Russia, BY Belarus, CN China and 1 more, Олексій in UA Ukraine and Alexei in MD Moldova.

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)

Short form of Alexandre or Alexandra, from Greek alexein 'to defend'.

Sources 1

  • Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)

Attested across 15 languages in the etymology graph.

How Alex is read(measured from records)

Alex is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.

  • English50%

    A unisex given name from Ancient Greek.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • Spanish18%

    Abreviación de Alexander.

    as a nameDiccionario etimológico de nombres propios

  • Portuguese9.5%

    No dictionary in our sources glosses Alex in Portuguese.

The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Alex 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 Alex is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
RU Russia#5≈3,200,000 est.≈1 in 45#5Алексей291
CN China—≈930,000 est.≈1 in 1.5K—Алексей119
UA Ukraine#15≈470,000 est.≈1 in 94listedОлексій156
US United States#162373,4671 in 891351KAlex667
BR Brazil#97294,5671 in 719312KAlex242
BY Belarus#7≈100,000 est.≈1 in 9529Алексей76
EC Ecuador#9567,3861 in 25167KAlex91
FI Finland#840,989as Aleksi1 in 13646KАлексей124
MD Moldova#1030,694as Oleg1 in 11031KAlexei65

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; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); IBGE — Nomes (census name API); Universal Dependencies Belarusian-HSE Corpus — Person Names (UD_Belarusian-HSE); INEC — civil registry names; DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); e-services.md — living population register. 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)

Alex is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Hungarian given name15 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Hungary, United States, United Kingdom, Finland

    Languages: Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian

    Also written Álex, Àlex, Ålëx, Ãlex, Älex

  • a separate name4 spellings in the group

    Also written Aléx, Àlex, Álex

  • Indonesian given name16 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Indonesia, United States, Malaysia, Philippines

    Languages: Indonesian, Malay, Malagasy

    Also written 'Alex, Àlex, Álex, Älëx, Ãlex

  • Turkish given name8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Türkiye, Spain

    Languages: Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani

    Also written Álex, Àlex, Alex'

112 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)

Alex is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In French, Short form of Alexandre or Alexandra, from Greek alexein 'to defend'.

    as a nameLe grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)

  • ¢,@ Short form of Alexander, ae and pAlexis; also commonly used as a given name in its own right. Variant: Alix (9).

    as a nameA concise dictionary of first names

  • In Swedish, Alex är ursprungligen en smekform till → Alexander. Förekommer även som kvinnonamn efter engelskt mönster (smekform till → Alexandra). En känd namnbärare är författaren Alex Schulman (f. 1976). I den finlandssvenska almanackan 11 september.

    as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon

  • In French, Diminutif d’Alexandre ou d’Alexis; origine grecque, « homme qui repousse ».

    as a nameLe grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)

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)

19201940196019802000Karl Alexander Müller, b. 1927Alex Ferguson, b. 1941Alex Winter, b. 1965Alex Dimitriades, b. 1973Alex Jones, b. 1974Alex Morgan, b. 1989Alex Sharp, b. 1989Alex Sandro, b. 1991Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, b. 1993Alex Iwobi, b. 1996

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 Alex,

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 160 sources across 84 countries.

Official registers attesting Alex
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020351K#127
BR BrazilIBGE — Nomes (census name API)—312K#153
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)2022295K—
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—292K#101
EC EcuadorINEC — civil registry names202467K#23
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202023K#127
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)—7.4K#242
FI FinlandDVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register)—6.6K—
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)20204.2K—
MD Moldovae-services.md — living population register—2.8K#228
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—2.3K#101

Reference works 8

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

Is Alex a male or female name?
Alex 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 Alex?
In the etymology graph, Ali, Sandra and Sandrine are forms of the same name in other languages.
Where does the name Alex come from?
Short form of Alexandre or Alexandra, from Greek alexein 'to defend'. Recorded by Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education).
In which country does Alex have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 3.2 million people named Алексей in Russia, more than in any other country we hold.
Where is Alex most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Alex is densest in Ecuador — about 1 in 251 people — even though Russia holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Alex?
In the United States, the national register counted 373,467 people named Alex in 2020, about 1 in 891 residents.
How common is Alex compared with other names?
In Russia, Alex is the 5th most common given name of 472,143 given names recorded there.
What does the name Alex mean?
In English, A unisex given name from Ancient Greek.
How do you pronounce Alex?
A machine transcription gives /ælɪks/ (IPA) for English.

What do you want to know about Alex?

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

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

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, “Alex” — the 5th most common given name in Russia. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Alex parses inside a full name →