Keniya
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Ascetic who maintained wife and children; visited the Buddha and offered five hundred pingo-loads of badarapāna (S.i.446; DA.i.270)
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/kəniə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Keniya is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country.
- INIndia1 in 265M(measured from records)
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.
- India (measured from records)
- Sources
- 91 (measured from records)
- 1 in 265M (inferred from the name graph)
5 people
Highest-authority source
India
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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)
Ascetic who maintained wife and children; visited the Buddha and offered five hundred pingo-loads of badarapāna (S.i.446; DA.i.270).
Sources 1
- Dictionary of Pali Proper Names Vol I (A-Dh)
Where in the world(measured from records)
Keniya 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | 5 | 1 in 265M | 5 | Keniya | 17 |
| US United States | — | — | 490 | Keniya | 91 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | — | — | Keniya | 4 |
| AU Australia | — | — | — | Keniya | 5 |
| PG Papua New Guinea | — | — | 1 | — | — |
5 people counted by Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls. 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; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; PNG Election Results Database — candidate names (1972–2022). 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)
Keniya is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In pi, A jaṭila brahmin of Āpaṇa who entertained the Buddha and his monks; Vin. i. 245 f.
as a nameDictionary of Pali Proper Names Vol I (A-Dh)
In pi, In the Apadāna1 Mahā Kappina is mentioned as having belonged to the Keniyajāti. Perhaps this is a wrong reading; the corresponding verse in ThagA. (i. 510) gives Koliya. if. 469, v. 16.
as a nameDictionary of Pali Proper Names Vol I (A-Dh)
In Azerbaijani, Kenya (a country in East Africa)
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.
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 6 sources across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 5 | #186,604 |
| PG Papua New Guinea | PNG Election Results Database — candidate names (1972–2022) | — | 1 | #35 |
Reference works 1
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
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 Keniya mean, and where does it come from?
- Ascetic who maintained wife and children; visited the Buddha and offered five hundred pingo-loads of badarapāna (S.i.446; DA.i.270). Recorded by Dictionary of Pali Proper Names Vol I (A-Dh).
- How do you pronounce Keniya?
- A machine transcription gives /kəniə/ (IPA) for Hindi.
- In which country does Keniya have the most bearers?
- In India, the national register counted about 5 people named Keniya, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled keniya.
- Where is Keniya most common?
- Keniya is densest in India, where the national register counts about 1 in 265 million people carrying it.
- How common is the name Keniya?
- In India, the national register counted 5 people named Keniya, about 1 in 265 million residents.
What do you want to know about Keniya?
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/keniyaThe 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, “Keniya”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.