Sabena

given name · Latin script

Meaning: Belgian airline

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/səˈbinə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Sabena is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 1.8M(measured from records)
  • GYGuyana1 in 63K
  • NLNetherlands1 in 1.9M

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)

190 people, 2020

Sources
133 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 63K (inferred from the name graph)

Guyana

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Belgian airline

Sources 1

  • Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

Where in the world(measured from records)

Sabena 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.

Where Sabena is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States1901 in 1.8M190Sabena133
GY Guyana121 in 63K12Sabena1
NL Netherlands91 in 1.9M9—2
GB United Kingdom———Sabena54
NG Nigeria———Sabena9

190 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. 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; Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018). 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Sabena is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Indonesian given name2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, Indonesia, United States

    Also written Sabeña

  • Portuguese given name2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Brazil, United States, India

    Also written Sabeña

  • Italian given name2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States

    Also written Sabeña

42 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Sabena is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In French, acronym of Societé anonyme belge d'Exploitation de la Navigation aérienne

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In Latvian, Beļģijas aviokompānija (fr. "Societe anonvme Belge d'exploitation de la navigation aerienne")

    as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)

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)

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)

InformalHi Sabena,

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 15 sources across 10 countries.

Official registers attesting Sabena
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 1

  • 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 Sabena mean, and where does it come from?
Belgian airline Recorded by Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names.
How do you pronounce Sabena?
A machine transcription gives /səˈbinə/ (IPA) for English.
Is Sabena a male or female name?
Sabena is a female 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 Sabena have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 190 people named Sabena, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sabena.
Where is Sabena most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Sabena is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 63 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Sabena?
In the United States, the national register counted 190 people named Sabena in 2020, about 1 in 1.8 million residents.

What do you want to know about Sabena?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/sabena

The 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, “Sabena”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Sabena parses inside a full name →