Sabah
loc · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Sabah is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Egypt than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Sabah (state in Malaysia): a state in eastern Malaysia located at the Northern part of the Borneo island with the main city Kota Kinabalu as its capital.
- KWKuwait≈1 in 6.7K(inferred from the name graph)
- MYMalaysia≈1 in 45K
- SESweden≈1 in 37K
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.
- Egypt (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 191 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 6.7K (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,400 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Kuwait, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Sabah (state in Malaysia): a state in eastern Malaysia located at the Northern part of the Borneo island with the main city Kota Kinabalu as its capital.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Sabah 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EG Egypt | ≈2,400 est. | ≈1 in 44K | listed | Sabah | 65 |
| ID Indonesia | ≈750 est. | ≈1 in 357K | — | Sabah | 35 |
| MY Malaysia | ≈720 est. | ≈1 in 45K | — | Sabah | 21 |
| SA Saudi Arabia | ≈660 est. | ≈1 in 52K | — | Sabah | 76 |
| FR France | ≈600 est. | ≈1 in 113K | 3.3K | — | 1 |
| KW Kuwait | ≈450 est. | ≈1 in 6.7K | — | Sabah | 76 |
| US United States | 374 | 1 in 889K | 1.7K | — | 191 |
| SE Sweden | ≈270 est. | ≈1 in 37K | 1.8K | — | 29 |
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: INSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex. 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)
Sabah is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
‘Morning’.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In German, weibl. Vom. arabischer Herkunft (arab. sabäh »Morgen« zu arab. sabaha »am Morgen geschehen« oder »Morgen werden«).
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
morning; dawn; beautiful
as a nameMuslim baby names (our 2,000 meaningful and beautiful names for boys and girls) English-Urdu with Roman
In Serbo-Croatian, Sabah (state in Malaysia)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In btd, wet ricefield, rice paddy
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
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)
- Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabahb. 1929KWemir of Kuwait (1929–2020)
- Sabah Fakhrib. 1933SYSyrian singer (1934–2021)
- Gérard Sabahb. 1948FRFrench engineer
- Sabah Abdul-Jalilb. 1951IQassociation football player (2000-)
- Sabah Abouessalamb. 1959MAMoroccan and French urban sociologist
- Sabah Naimb. 1967EGEgyptian multimedia artist
- Avi Sabahb. 1977ILIsraeli artist and lecturer (born 1977)
- Sabah Sanhourib. 1990SDSudanese fiction writer
- Alban Sabahb. 1992DEGerman footballer
- Sabah Seghirb. 2000FRFrench and Moroccan footballer
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 76 sources across 41 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 620 | #38,417 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 374 | #54,990 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 181 | #93,841 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1991 | 28 | — |
Reference works 5
- 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)
- 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 Sabah mean, and where does it come from?
- Sabah (state in Malaysia): a state in eastern Malaysia located at the Northern part of the Borneo island with the main city Kota Kinabalu as its capital. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- In which country does Sabah have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.4 thousand people named Sabah in Egypt, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sabah.
- How common is the name Sabah?
- In the United States, the national register counted 374 people named Sabah in 2010, about 1 in 889 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Sabah?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/sabahThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use; a free API key gives 1,000 requests a day, and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Sabah”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.