Preben
given name · Latin script
Meaning: a male given name borrowed from Danish Preben
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Preben is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Denmark than in any other country, where it is the 67th most common given name.
- DKDenmark1 in 663(measured from records)
- NONorway1 in 2.6K
- TNTunisia≈1 in 21K
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.
- Denmark (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 129 (measured from records)
- 1 in 663 (inferred from the name graph)
8,854 people
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Denmark
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
a male given name borrowed from Danish Preben
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Where in the world(measured from records)
Preben 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.
8,854 people counted by Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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: Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); 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).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Preben 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.
Danish: from medieval Pridbjørn , a reworking (with assimilation to the Scandinavian element bjørn bear) of the Slavonic personal name Pritbor , composed of the elements prid foremost, leading + bor battle.
as a word
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)
- Preben Philipsenb. 1910DKfilm producer (1910–2005)
- Preben Lerdorff Ryeb. 1917DKDanish actor (1917–1995)
- Bob Ramsingb. 1923DKnot in their usual nameDanish film director (1923-1998)
- Preben Dabelsteenb. 1925Danish badminton player (1925–2017)
- Preben Harrisb. 1935DKDanish actor
- Preben Isakssonb. 1943DKDanish cyclist (1943-2008)
- Preben Krabb. 1952DKDanish rower
- Preben Kristensenb. 1953DKDanish actor
- Preben Elkjærb. 1957DKDanish footballer
- Preben Van Heckeb. 1982BEroad bicycle racer
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 21 sources across 14 countries.
Reference works 2
- 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
- What does the name Preben mean, and where does it come from?
- a male given name borrowed from Danish Preben Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- Is Preben a male or female name?
- Preben is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- In which country does Preben have the most bearers?
- In Denmark, the national register counted about 8.9 thousand people named Preben, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled preben.
- Where is Preben most common?
- Preben is densest in Denmark, where the national register counts about 1 in 663 people carrying it.
- How common is the name Preben?
- In Denmark, the national register counted 8,854 people named Preben, about 1 in 663 residents.
- How common is Preben compared with other names?
- In Denmark, Preben is the 67th most common given name of 23,174 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Preben?
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/prebenThe 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, “Preben” — the 67th most common given name in Denmark. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.