Nadkarni
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Hindu (usually Brahman) name meaning ‘district accountant’, from Kannada nau ‘province’, ‘district’ -l- Sanskrit karana ‘writer’ or karni ‘helmsman’ (Dictionary of American Family Names)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 7 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Nadkarni is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country: 605 people, counted by Instate.
- USUnited States1 in 646K(measured from records)
- NONorway1 in 1.4M
- INIndia1 in 2.2M
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- India (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 4 (measured from records)
- 1 in 646K (inferred from the name graph)
605 people
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: reference-verified
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Hindu (usually Brahman) name meaning ‘district accountant’, from Kannada nau ‘province’, ‘district’ -l- Sanskrit karana ‘writer’ or karni ‘helmsman’. It used to be the title of a hereditary official, equivalent to Deshpande in other areas.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where the surname Nadkarni is found
(measured from records)Nadkarni 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 | 605 | 1 in 2.2M | 605 | Nadkarni | 3 |
| US United States | 515 | 1 in 646K | 631 | Nadkarni | 4 |
| NO Norway | 4 | 1 in 1.4M | 4 | — | 1 |
| CR Costa Rica | 2 | 1 in 2.5M | 2 | — | — |
| SE Sweden | 2 | 1 in 5.1M | 2 | — | — |
605 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 — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names; 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).
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Sushil Nadkarnib. 1976INIndian cricketer
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)14 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 7 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Nadkarni mean, and where does it come from?
- Hindu (usually Brahman) name meaning ‘district accountant’, from Kannada nau ‘province’, ‘district’ -l- Sanskrit karana ‘writer’ or karni ‘helmsman’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Nadkarni?
- In India, the national register counted about 605 people named Nadkarni, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled nadkarni. After it come United States, Norway, Costa Rica and Sweden; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Nadkarni most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Nadkarni is densest in the United States — about 1 in 646 thousand people — even though India holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Nadkarni?
- In India, the national register counted 605 people named Nadkarni, about 1 in 2.2 million residents.
What do you want to know about Nadkarni?
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/nadkarniThe 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, “Nadkarni” — ranked 8002nd in India (Instate). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.