Kanani
surname · Latin script
Meaning: explorer
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Kanani is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Tanzania than in any other country.
- TZTanzania≈1 in 24K(inferred from the name graph)
- SESweden1 in 126K
- KEKenya≈1 in 161K
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.
- Tanzania (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 115 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 24K (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,500 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Tanzania, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
explorer
Sources 1
- African Muslim Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kanani 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TZ Tanzania | ≈2,500 est. | ≈1 in 24K | — | Kanani | 7 |
| US United States | 334 | 1 in 996K | 767 | Kanani | 115 |
| KE Kenya | ≈330 est. | ≈1 in 161K | listed | Kanani | 11 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈270 est. | ≈1 in 243K | — | Kanani | 52 |
| ID Indonesia | ≈240 est. | ≈1 in 1.1M | listed | — | — |
| CA Canada | ≈210 est. | ≈1 in 177K | — | Kanani | 33 |
| SE Sweden | 81 | 1 in 126K | 81 | Kanani | 5 |
| CH Switzerland | 49 | 1 in 172K | 49 | — | 1 |
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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (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)
Kanani is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
Bella
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
In Hawaiian, a male or female given name from Hawaiian
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)
- Nasser Kanaanib. 1970IRnot in their usual nameIranian diplomat
- Nikita Kananib. 1980GBGeneral Practitioner; first woman to be Director of Primary Care in the NHS.
- Sheila KananiGBBritish astronomer
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 28 sources across 17 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 471 | #48,441 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 334 | #60,347 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 204 | #85,297 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 81 | #8,534 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 49 | #18,963 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 Kanani mean, and where does it come from?
- explorer Recorded by African Muslim Names.
- In which country does Kanani have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.5 thousand people named Kanani in Tanzania, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kanani.
- How common is the name Kanani?
- In the United States, the national register counted 334 people named Kanani in 2010, about 1 in 996 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Kanani?
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/kananiThe 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, “Kanani”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.