Kanji
surname · Latin script
Meaning: crooked
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/kændʒi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kanji is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Tanzania than in any other country.
- INIndia1 in 1.7M(measured from records)
- TZTanzania≈1 in 70K
- CACanada≈1 in 71K
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
- 183 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 70K (inferred from the name graph)
≈830 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Tanzania, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
crooked
Sources 1
- The Penguin book of Hindu names for boys
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kanji 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 | ≈830 est. | ≈1 in 70K | — | Kanji | 20 |
| IN India | 789 | 1 in 1.7M | 789 | Kanji | 74 |
| CA Canada | ≈530 est. | ≈1 in 71K | — | Kanji | 89 |
| KE Kenya | ≈450 est. | ≈1 in 120K | — | Kanji | 15 |
| PK Pakistan | ≈330 est. | ≈1 in 698K | — | Kanji | 10 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈63 est. | ≈1 in 78K | — | Kanji | 26 |
| LV Latvia | ≈12 est. | ≈1 in 159K | — | Kanji | 5 |
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. 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)
Kanji is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, The system of writing Japanese using Chinese characters.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Polish, kanji (Chinese characters in Japanese context)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Indonesian, tapioca
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Malay, starch
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)
- Yasmin Kanjib. 1950TZbadminton player
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 26 sources across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 955 | #6 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 789 | #6,542 |
Reference works 4
- 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
- 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 Kanji mean, and where does it come from?
- crooked Recorded by The Penguin book of Hindu names for boys.
- How do you pronounce Kanji?
- A machine transcription gives /kændʒi/ (IPA) for Hindi.
- What are other forms of the name Kanji?
- In the etymology graph, Han is a form of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Kanji have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 834 people named Kanji in Tanzania, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kanji.
- How common is the name Kanji?
- In India, the national register counted 789 people named Kanji, about 1 in 1.7 million residents.
What do you want to know about Kanji?
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/kanjiThe 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, “Kanji”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.