Ilse
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Toponymic surname from a river/place name; variant van Ilsen
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ɪlzə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Ilse is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country.
- NLNetherlands1 in 941(measured from records)
- DEGermany≈1 in 1.5K
- BEBelgium≈1 in 1.7K
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.
- Germany (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 246 (measured from records)
- 1 in 941 (inferred from the name graph)
≈54,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Netherlands
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(measured from records)
Toponymic surname from a river/place name; variant van Ilsen. Bearer count not stated.
Sources 1
- Deutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte
Attested across 16 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Ilse 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DE Germany | #314 | ≈54,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | listed | Ilse | 146 |
| NL Netherlands | #168 | 18,355 | 1 in 941 | 18K | Ilse | 103 |
| BE Belgium | #270 | ≈6,900 est. | ≈1 in 1.7K | 5 | Ilse | 116 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈6,600 est. | ≈1 in 8.5K | — | Ilse | 62 |
| US United States | — | 4,972 | 1 in 67K | 5K | Ilse | 246 |
| AT Austria | #315 | ≈3,900 est. | ≈1 in 2.3K | 97 | Ilse | 80 |
| SE Sweden | — | 2,881 | 1 in 3.5K | 2.9K | Ilse | 25 |
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; Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); Statbel — Prénoms nouveau-nés (newborns); Statistik Austria — STATatlas Vornamen WFS (per-name time series 1984–2024); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (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)
Ilse 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, Toponymic surname from the river/place Ilse.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte
In German, a diminutive of the female given name Elisabeth, popular in the 1920s and 1930s
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In German, Toponymischer Familienname, wohl Wohnstättenname; nach der Ilse (Fluss/Ortsname). 428 Belege.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte
In Swedish, Ilse är ursprungligen en tysk smekform till → Elisabeth. Det har blivit populärt i Sverige det senaste årtiondet. I den finlandssvenska almanackan 14 oktober.
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
In French, Dérivé d’Élisabeth, d’origine hébraïque (Elisheba) ; « Dieu est plénitude ».
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)
- Ilse Bingb. 1899DEGerman photographer (1899-1998)
- Ilse Hessb. 1900DEGerman author (1900-1995)
- Ilse Kochb. 1906DEGerman war criminal, wife of camp commandant Karl-Otto Koch (1906–1967)
- Ilse Braunb. 1909DEsister of Eva Braun (1909-1979)
- Ilse Stöbeb. 1911DEGerman journalist and anti-Nazi resistance fighter (1911-1942)
- Ilse Steppatb. 1917DEGerman actress (1917–1969)
- Ilse Aichingerb. 1921ATAustrian writer (1921–2016)
- Katja Ebsteinb. 1945DEnot in their usual nameGerman singer
- Ilse DeLangeb. 1977NLDutch country and pop singer
- Ilse Salasb. 1981MXMexican actress
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 66 sources across 31 countries.
Reference works 4
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name 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
- How do you pronounce Ilse?
- A machine transcription gives /ɪlzə/ (IPA) for German.
- Where does the name Ilse come from?
- Toponymic surname from a river/place name; variant van Ilsen. Bearer count not stated. Recorded by Deutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte.
- In which country does Ilse have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 54 thousand people named Ilse in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled ilse.
- Where is Ilse most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Ilse is densest in the Netherlands — about 1 in 941 people — even though Germany holds more of our records for it.
- Is Ilse a male or female name?
- Ilse is a female 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 Ilse?
- In the etymology graph, Elizabeth, Lisa and Isabel are forms of the same name in other languages.
- What does the name Ilse mean?
- Recorded meaning: Toponymic surname from a river/place name; variant van Ilsen.
- How common is the name Ilse?
- In the Netherlands, the national register counted 18,355 people named Ilse, about 1 in 941 residents.
- How common is Ilse compared with other names?
- In Germany, Ilse is the 314th most common given name of 156,202 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Ilse?
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/ilseThe 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, “Ilse” — the 314th most common given name in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.