Kanal
surname · Latin script
Meaning: canal (waterway used for transportation of vessels)
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Kanal is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- INIndia1 in 22M(measured from records)
- NLNetherlands1 in 691K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 2.1M
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 65 (measured from records)
- 1 in 691K (inferred from the name graph)
101 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Netherlands
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
canal (waterway used for transportation of vessels)
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kanal 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 101 | 1 in 3.3M | 108 | Kanal | 55 |
| IN India | 60 | 1 in 22M | 60 | Kanal | 65 |
| NL Netherlands | 25 | 1 in 691K | 25 | — | 1 |
| PL Poland | 8 | 1 in 4.8M | 4 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | 4 | 1 in 2.1M | 4 | — | 1 |
101 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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: Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (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)
Kanal 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 the place name Gladbach
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
In German, canal, channel
as a wordA Frequency Dictionary of German
In Estonian, canal (artificial waterway or river used for travel, shipping or irrigation)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Indonesian, canal (an artificial waterway or artificially improved river)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Norwegian Nynorsk, channel (narrow body of water)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)
- Arno Kanalb. 1964EEEstonian soil scientist (1964-2019)
- Tony Kanalb. 1970GBBritish-American musician
- Laveen KanalUSPh.D. University of Pennsylvania 1960
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 16 sources across 8 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 189 | #2,396 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 108 | #150,935 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 101 | #159,712 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 60 | #39,862 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 25 | #45,034 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 4 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 4 | — |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 4 | #118,617 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 4 | #224,235 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 4 | #226,534 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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
- What does the name Kanal mean, and where does it come from?
- canal (waterway used for transportation of vessels) Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- In which country does Kanal have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 101 people named Kanal, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kanal.
- Where is Kanal most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Kanal is densest in the Netherlands — about 1 in 691 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Kanal?
- In the United States, the national register counted 101 people named Kanal in 2010, about 1 in 3.3 million residents.
What do you want to know about Kanal?
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/kanalThe 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, “Kanal”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.