Gilani
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/dʒɫɑni/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Gilani is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Pakistan than in any other country.
- PKPakistan≈1 in 12K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 215K
- USUnited States1 in 341K
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.
- Pakistan (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 226 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 12K (inferred from the name graph)
≈20,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Pakistan, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Gilani 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PK Pakistan | ≈20,000 est. | ≈1 in 12K | 6 | Gilani | 68 |
| US United States | 976 | 1 in 341K | 1.2K | Gilani | 226 |
| ID Indonesia | ≈370 est. | ≈1 in 727K | — | Gilani | 7 |
| CA Canada | ≈320 est. | ≈1 in 119K | — | Gilani | 64 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈310 est. | ≈1 in 215K | — | Gilani | 86 |
| AE United Arab Emirates | ≈230 est. | ≈1 in 43K | — | Gilani | 37 |
| OM Oman | ≈140 est. | ≈1 in 33K | — | Gilani | 14 |
| NO Norway | 98 | 1 in 56K | 98 | — | 2 |
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 — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) — Form-33 List of Contesting Candidates, 2018 General Election; 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)
Gilani is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Latvian, tauta Irānā, valoda pieder pie irāņu valodām, tuvu radniecīgi persiešiem, ticīgie - musulmaņi (šiīti)
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
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)
- Abdul Qadir Gilanib. 1078IRSunni Muslim preacher, mystic and jurist (1078–1166)
- Zahed Gilanib. 1216IRGrandmaster (Murshid Kamil) of the famed Zahediyeh Sufi Order at Lahijan
- Abd Al-Rahman al-Gillanib. 1841IQnot in their usual nameFirst Prime Minister of Iraq (1841–1927)
- Golchin Gilanib. 1910IRIranian poet (1910–1972)
- Ghulam Moinuddin Gilanib. 1920PKSufi Scholar from Pakistan (1920-1997)
- Syed Ali Shah Geelanib. 1929INnot in their usual nameKashmiri Politician, separatist leader (1929–2021)
- Syed Salman Gilanib. 1951PKPakistani poet
- Yousaf Raza Gillanib. 1952PKnot in their usual namePrime Minister of Pakistan from 2008 to 2012
- Noshi Gilanib. 1964PKPakistani writer
- Jamaluddin Al-Jailanib. 1972IQnot in their usual nameIraqi Historian and University Professor
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)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 29 sources across 14 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.2K | #21,752 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 976 | #25,356 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 599 | #35,522 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 98 | #15,505 |
| PK Pakistan | Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) — Form-33 List of Contesting Candidates, 2018 General Election | 2018 | 6 | #125 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
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
- How do you pronounce Gilani?
- A machine transcription gives /dʒɫɑni/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Gilani have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 20 thousand people named Gilani in Pakistan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled gilani.
- How common is the name Gilani?
- In the United States, the national register counted 976 people named Gilani in 2010, about 1 in 341 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Gilani?
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/gilaniThe 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, “Gilani”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.