Nakata
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘central rice paddy’; from a common place name found throughout Japan
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/nɑˈkɑtə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Nakata is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 182K(measured from records)
- BRBrazil1 in 195K
- BEBelgium1 in 1.7M
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
- 202 (measured from records)
- 1 in 182K (inferred from the name graph)
1,826 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘central rice paddy’; from a common place name found throughout Japan. The surname occurs mostly in western Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. A common alternate pronunciation is Nakada. Some bearers have southern Fujiwara or Minamoto connections.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Nakata 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 | 1,826 | 1 in 182K | 1.8K | Nakata | 202 |
| BR Brazil | 1,088 | 1 in 195K | 1.1K | — | 2 |
| BE Belgium | 7 | 1 in 1.7M | 7 | Nakata | 3 |
| CZ Czechia | 6 | 1 in 1.8M | 6 | — | — |
| PL Poland | 4 | 1 in 9.6M | 4 | — | 1 |
| CH Switzerland | 3 | 1 in 2.8M | 3 | — | 2 |
1,826 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: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); MVČR — living population register 2017; dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); 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)
Nakata is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Finnish, To throw (away), to bung.
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)
- Yoshio Nakatab. 1906JPJapanese politician
- Jouji Nakatab. 1954JPJapanese voice actor
- Kō Nakatab. 1960JPIslamic law scholar
- Linda Nagatab. 1960USnot in their usual nameAmerican writer
- Hideo Nakatab. 1961JPJapanese film director
- Hidetoshi Nakatab. 1977JPJapanese association football player
- Koji Nakatab. 1979JPJapanese association football player
- Yasutaka Nakatab. 1980JPJapanese music producer and DJ
- Akira Nagatab. 1985JPnot in their usual nameJapanese singer and voice actor
- Sho Nakatab. 1989JPJapanese baseball 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 18 sources across 9 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.8K | #15,912 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.6K | #16,688 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.3K | #20,933 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 1.1K | #8,594 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 7 | #84,815 |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 6 | #110,557 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 4 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 4 | #231,468 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 3 | #154,370 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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
- Where does the name Nakata come from?
- ‘central rice paddy’; from a common place name found throughout Japan. The surname occurs mostly in western Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. A common alternate pronunciation is Nakada. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Nakata?
- A machine transcription gives /nɑˈkɑtə/ (IPA) for Japanese.
- What does the name Nakata mean?
- Recorded meaning: ‘central rice paddy’; from a common place name found throughout Japan.
- In which country does Nakata have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 1.8 thousand people named Nakata, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled nakata.
- Where is Nakata most common?
- Nakata is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 182 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Nakata?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,826 people named Nakata in 2010, about 1 in 182 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Nakata?
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/nakataThe 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, “Nakata”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.