Nkrumah
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Kwame, president, Ghana
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ŋkɹumə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Nkrumah is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- NLNetherlands1 in 402K(measured from records)
- SESweden1 in 680K
- NONorway1 in 683K
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
- 31 (measured from records)
- 1 in 402K (inferred from the name graph)
390 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Netherlands
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Kwame, president, Ghana
Sources 1
- Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
How Nkrumah is read(measured from records)
Nkrumah is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- Akan87%
Akan: ninth-born child
as a nameAfrican Names
Akan of Ghana: name
as a nameAfrican Names
- English76%
Kwame, president, Ghana
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
- Swahili9.3%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Nkrumah in Swahili.
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Nkrumah 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 | 390 | 1 in 853K | 546 | Nkrumah | 8 |
| ES Spain | 57 | 1 in 877K | 57 | — | — |
| NL Netherlands | 43 | 1 in 402K | 43 | — | 4 |
| SE Sweden | 15 | 1 in 680K | 15 | — | — |
| BE Belgium | 13 | 1 in 902K | 13 | Nkrumah | 4 |
| NO Norway | 8 | 1 in 683K | 8 | — | — |
390 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, 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)
- Kwame Nkrumahb. 1909GHGhanaian politician (1909–1972)
- Gamal Nkrumahb. 1959GHGhanaian journalist, Pan-Africanist and newspaper editor
- Samia Nkrumahb. 1960GHGhanaian journalist and politician
- Pearl Nkrumahb. 1980GHGhanaian businesswoman, lawyer and corporate executive
- Aaron Nkrumahb. 2001USAmerican basketball player (born 2001)
- Afia Nkrumahfilm director
- Ama NkrumahGHGhanaian female political activist during and after Ghana's independence struggle
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 20 sources across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 546 | #42,735 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 390 | #53,072 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 158 | #104,819 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 57 | #40,874 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 57 | #40,491 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 43 | #33,698 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 15 | #30,774 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 13 | #61,673 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 8 | #61,859 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- 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
- What does the name Nkrumah mean, and where does it come from?
- Kwame, president, Ghana Recorded by Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names.
- How do you pronounce Nkrumah?
- A machine transcription gives /ŋkɹumə/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Nkrumah have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 390 people named Nkrumah, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled nkrumah.
- Where is Nkrumah most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Nkrumah is densest in the Netherlands — about 1 in 402 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Nkrumah?
- In the United States, the national register counted 390 people named Nkrumah in 2010, about 1 in 853 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Nkrumah?
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/nkrumahThe 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, “Nkrumah”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.