Hans
given name · Latin script
Meaning: German short form of Johannes, from Hebrew Yôḥānān meaning “YHWH is gracious”
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/hans/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Hans is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In the Netherlands it is the 8th most common given name.
- SESweden1 in 91(measured from records)
- DEGermany≈1 in 173
- DKDenmark1 in 225
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 Hans 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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- 7 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 423 (measured from records)
- 1 in 91 (inferred from the name graph)
≈590,000 named Han, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Sweden
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Han in CN China.
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)
German short form of Johannes, from Hebrew Yôḥānān meaning “YHWH is gracious”.
Sources 1
- Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education)
Attested across 13 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Hans 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈590,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.3K | — | Han | 76 |
| DE Germany | #19 | ≈460,000 est. | ≈1 in 173 | — | Hans | 313 |
| SE Sweden | #44 | 111,856 | 1 in 91 | 112K | Hans | 168 |
| DK Denmark | #27 | 26,086 | 1 in 225 | 26K | Hans | 203 |
| NO Norway | #26 | 19,176 | 1 in 285 | 44K | Hans | 155 |
| CH Switzerland | #15 | ≈17,000 est. | ≈1 in 505 | 290 | Hans | 162 |
| NL Netherlands | #8 | 9as Hân | 1 in 1.9M | 20K | Hans | 191 |
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: Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames). 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)
Hans 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 German, from Hans, a short form of Johann < Hebrew Yôḥānān 'Yahweh is gracious'
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
In French, German diminutive of Johannes, 'God is gracious'.
as a nameDictionnaire généalogique des prénoms
In German, Used as a comparison for patronymic suffixes -mann, -ing and -er. Morphological pattern: base name for suffix comparison.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 3: Morphologie der Familiennamen
Hindu (Arora) and Sikh name, from Sanskrit hamsa ‘swan’, ‘goose’, based on the name of an Arora clan.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
from a common and long-established vernacular personal name, an aphetic form of Johannes (see John). The surname is also borne by Ashkenazic Jews, presumably as an adoption of the German or Dutch surname.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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)
- Hans Memlingb. 1435DEGerman/Flemish painter (c. 1430–1494)
- Hans Holbeinb. 1497DEGerman artist and printmaker (1497–1543)
- Hans Christian Oerstedb. 1777DKDanish physicist and chemist (1777-1851)
- Paul von Hindenburgb. 1847DEnot in their usual namePrussian-German field marshal of the German Empire, statesman and president of Weimar Germany and Nazi Germany (1847–1934)
- Emil Noldeb. 1867DEnot in their usual nameGerman artist (1867–1956)
- Hans Albert Einsteinb. 1904CHSwiss-American engineer and educator (1904-1973)
- Hans Betheb. 1906USGerman-American nuclear physicist
- Hans Schäferb. 1927DEGerman footballer (1927-2017)
- Hans Blixb. 1928SESwedish politician (born 1928)
- Pete Docterb. 1968USnot in their usual nameAmerican animator and film director
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 122 sources across 58 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 112K | #22 |
| SE Sweden | SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023) | 2020 | 45K | — |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 44K | #72 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 26K | #21 |
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017) | — | 20K | #161 |
| NO Norway | SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891) | 2025 | 19K | — |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navn (1880–present) | 2025 | 69 | — |
Reference works 11
- 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
- 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
- Hoffman, Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings (2nd ed., 2012)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
- 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 Hans mean, and where does it come from?
- German short form of Johannes, from Hebrew Yôḥānān meaning “YHWH is gracious”. Recorded by Le grand guide des prénoms (Enfant - Education).
- Is Hans a male or female name?
- Hans 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 Hans?
- In the etymology graph, John, Juan and Ivan are forms of the same name in other languages; Hampus is a recorded short or pet form; it is recorded as a short form of Jan and Johan.
- In which country does Hans have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 594 thousand people named Han in China, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Hans most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Hans is densest in Sweden — about 1 in 91 people — even though China holds more of our records for it.
- How do you pronounce Hans?
- A machine transcription gives /hans/ (IPA) for German.
- How common is the name Hans?
- In Sweden, the national register counted 111,856 people named Hans, about 1 in 91 residents.
- How common is Hans compared with other names?
- In the Netherlands, Hans is the 8th most common given name of 101,916 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Hans?
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/hansThe 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, “Hans” — the 8th most common given name in Netherlands. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.