Nicolay
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Ca. 953 Tokens/6 types; lat
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Nicolay is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Russia than in any other country, where it is the 14th most common given name.
- BGBulgaria1 in 75as Николай(measured from records)
- RURussia≈1 in 85as Николай
- KZKazakhstan≈1 in 193as Николай
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Nicolay itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Russia (inferred from the name graph)
- #47 (measured from records)
- 7 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 282 (measured from records)
- 1 in 75 (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,700,000 named Николай, est.
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Bulgaria, as Николай
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Николай in RU Russia, KZ Kazakhstan, UA Ukraine and 2 more and Nikolaj in MD Moldova.
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)
Ca. 953 Tokens/6 types; lat. Genitivpatronym zu Nikolaus, mit -y-Schreibung als morphologische Variante.
Sources 1
- Deutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 3: Morphologie der Familiennamen
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Nicolay 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RU Russia | #14 | ≈1,700,000 est. | ≈1 in 85 | #2 | Николай | 259 |
| KZ Kazakhstan | #10 | ≈99,000 est. | ≈1 in 193 | 15K | Николай | 66 |
| BG Bulgaria | #4 | 92,940as Николай | 1 in 75 | 93K | Николай | 193 |
| UA Ukraine | #85 | ≈81,000 est. | ≈1 in 545 | — | Николай | 98 |
| BY Belarus | #18 | ≈40,000 est. | ≈1 in 236 | 27 | Николай | 54 |
| MD Moldova | #83 | 32,823as Nicolai | 1 in 103 | 33K | Nikolaj | 30 |
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: Bureau of National Statistics — birth registrations; NSI — most common given names (population); Universal Dependencies Belarusian-HSE Corpus — Person Names (UD_Belarusian-HSE); e-services.md — living population register. 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)
Nicolay 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.
2. English: variant of Nicholas.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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)
- John George Nicolayb. 1832USGerman-American civil servant and author
- Adolphe Nicolayb. 1923BEassociation football player
- Jean Nicolayb. 1937BEBelgian footballer (1937–2014)
- Klaas Nicolayb. 1951NLresearcher (1951-2017)
- Kevin Michael Nicolayb. 1957US1957 - 1990 Also known as: K. M. N. ; Kevin M. Nicolay ;
- Scott Nicolayb. 1963USAmerican writer
- David Henri Nicolayb. 1973FRPh.D. École Polytechnique 2011
- Christian Nicolayb. 1976DEGerman javelin thrower
- Franz Nicolayb. 1977USAmerican musician
- Kevin Nicolayb. 1981BEBelgian association football 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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 49 sources across 23 countries.
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name 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 Nicolay come from?
- Ca. 953 Tokens/6 types; lat. Genitivpatronym zu Nikolaus, mit -y-Schreibung als morphologische Variante. Recorded by Deutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 3: Morphologie der Familiennamen.
- What does the name Nicolay mean?
- Recorded meaning: Ca. 953 Tokens/6 types; lat.
- In which country does Nicolay have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.7 million people named Николай in Russia, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Nicolay most common?
- No national register we hold counts the spelling Nicolay itself. The densest figure for its family of spellings is Bulgaria's: the national register counts about 1 in 75 people named Николай.
- How common is the name Nicolay?
- In Bulgaria, the national register counted 92,940 people named Николай in 2018, about 1 in 75 residents.
- How common is Nicolay compared with other names?
- In Russia, Nicolay is the 14th most common given name of 472,143 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Nicolay?
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/nicolayThe 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, “Nicolay” — the 14th most common given name in Russia. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.