Nishan
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Amharic: 'award, medal'
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ɲiʃən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Nishan is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Sri Lanka than in any other country.
- PKPakistan≈1 in 301K(inferred from the name graph)
- LKSri Lanka≈1 in 1.3K
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 83K
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.
- Sri Lanka (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 127 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.3K (inferred from the name graph)
≈17,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Sri Lanka, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Amharic: 'award, medal'
Sources 1
- African Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Nishan 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LK Sri Lanka | ≈17,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | — | Nishan | 26 |
| US United States | 791 | 1 in 421K | 748 | Nishan | 127 |
| PK Pakistan | ≈780 est. | ≈1 in 301K | — | Nishan | 14 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈680 est. | ≈1 in 83K | — | Nishan | 11 |
| ID Indonesia | ≈420 est. | ≈1 in 639K | — | Nishan | 15 |
| MY Malaysia | ≈290 est. | ≈1 in 111K | — | Nishan | 17 |
| SG Singapore | ≈58 est. | ≈1 in 107K | — | Nishan | 6 |
| GY Guyana | 8 | 1 in 94K | 8 | — | — |
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; Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)
Nishan 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.
award, medal.
as a nameAfrican Names
Signo
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
In Albanian, mark
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)
- Nishan Yaubyanb. 1928TRArmenian descent Turkish architect, teacher
- Dinuka Karunaratneb. 1987LKnot in their usual namebadminton player
- DJ Stijcob. 1992NLnot in their usual nameDutch record producer
- Nishan Randhawab. 1997CACanadian freestyle wrestler
- Nishan Velupillayb. 2001AUAustralian soccer player (born 2001)
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)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 37 sources across 21 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Ethiopian name tokens (GitHub lehagere/ethiopian-names, 40/60 condominium list)
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 Nishan mean, and where does it come from?
- Amharic: 'award, medal' Recorded by African Names.
- How do you pronounce Nishan?
- A machine transcription gives /ɲiʃən/ (IPA) for Hindi.
- Is Nishan a male or female name?
- Nishan is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
- In which country does Nishan have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 17 thousand people named Nishan in Sri Lanka, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled nishan.
- How common is the name Nishan?
- In the United States, the national register counted 791 people named Nishan in 2020, about 1 in 421 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Nishan?
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/nishanThe 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, “Nishan”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.