German
given name · Latin script
Meaning: (i) from the male personal name Germain; (ii) person from Germany, or someone with commercial or other dealings with Germany
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/çerman/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
German is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Argentina than in any other country.
- ARArgentina≈1 in 786(inferred from the name graph)
- SVEl Salvador≈1 in 793
- COColombia≈1 in 851
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 German 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.
- Argentina (inferred from the name graph)
- #721 (measured from records)
- 4 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 404 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 786 (inferred from the name graph)
≈58,000 people, est.
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Argentina, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Герман in RU Russia and Herman in NO Norway.
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)
(i) from the male personal name Germain; (ii) person from Germany, or someone with commercial or other dealings with Germany.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 21 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
German 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AR Argentina | #165 | ≈58,000 est. | ≈1 in 786 | 1.6K | German | 158 |
| CO Colombia | #139 | ≈58,000 est. | ≈1 in 851 | 90 | German | 176 |
| RU Russia | #146 | ≈51,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.8K | #69 | Герман | 182 |
| US United States | — | 42,824as Herman | 1 in 7.8K | 43K | German | 404 |
| PE Peru | #179 | ≈33,000 est. | ≈1 in 960 | — | German | 96 |
| ES Spain | #213 | 24,059 | 1 in 2.1K | 24K | German | 190 |
| SV El Salvador | #223 | ≈8,200 est. | ≈1 in 793 | — | German | 53 |
| NO Norway | — | 5,766as Herman | 1 in 948 | 22K | Herman | 13 |
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: RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; the co-datosgov-candidates register; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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 recorded senses(measured from records)
German is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from OFr Germain, Lat Germanus ‘a German’; first attested Germanus 1086 DB, c1150 DC (L)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In French, From Latin Germanus, 'brotherly, of the same stock'; St Germanus.
as a nameDictionnaire généalogique des prénoms
From the Late Latin name Germanus ‘brother’, sometimes used with the meaning ‘brother in God’.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, A native or inhabitant of Germany; a person of German citizenship or nationality.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
alemão; Germanie; Amsterdam
as a nameDicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…
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)
- Herman of Alaskab. 1756RUnot in their usual nameSaint, monk
- Germain Henri Hessb. 1802CHnot in their usual nameSwiss chemist (1802–1850)
- Herman Larocheb. 1845RUnot in their usual nameRussian composer (1845–1904)
- Hermann Grapowb. 1885DEnot in their usual nameGerman egyptologist (1885-1967)
- German Galyninb. 1922RURussian composer (1922-1966)
- German Titovb. 1935RUSoviet cosmonaut (1935-2000)
- German Sveshnikovb. 1937RUSoviet fencer (1937-2003)
- German Kimb. 1953KZKazakhstani academic
- German Khanb. 1961UARussian businessman
- German Grefb. 1962RURussian economist
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)
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 96 sources across 47 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 25K | #1,399 |
| ES Spain | INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 24K | #129 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 24K | #303 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 238 | #4,224 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Nombres de nacimientos (2012–present) | 2024 | 173 | #553 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 112 | — |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 106 | #1,399 |
| CO Colombia | Colombia — Función Pública SIGEP II public-servant name corpus (datos.gov.co) | — | 90 | #46 |
| AR Argentina | datos.gob.ar — nombres.datos.gob.ar per-name lookup (1922–2015) | 2015 | 54 | — |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — births 1922–2015 (Kaggle mirror) | 2015 | 54 | — |
Reference works 7
- 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
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 German mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) from the male personal name Germain; (ii) person from Germany, or someone with commercial or other dealings with Germany. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce German?
- A machine transcription gives /çerman/ (IPA) for Spanish.
- In which country does German have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 58 thousand people named German in Argentina, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled german.
- What are other forms of the name German?
- In the etymology graph, Armando, Herman and Jermaine are forms of the same name in other languages.
- Is German a male or female name?
- German 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.
- How common is the name German?
- In Spain, the national register counted 24,059 people named German, about 1 in 2.1 thousand residents.
- How common is German compared with other names?
- In Argentina, German is the 165th most common given name of 119,825 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about German?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/germanThe 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, “German” — the 165th most common given name in Argentina. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.