Sankara
given name · Latin script
A male name· listed as male by the registers that count names by sex
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 18 countries
Sankara is a male given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country, where it is the 36th most common given name.
- AOAngola≈1 in 190Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- INIndia≈1 in 920as Shankar
- GYGuyana1 in 13Kas Shankar
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Sankara itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- India (inferred from the name graph)
- #502 (measured from records)
- 6 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 299 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 193K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,600,000 named Shankar, est.
of 15M given names, spellings grouped
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Angola, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Shankar in IN India, US United States, MY Malaysia and 6 more.
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
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Sankara 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | #36 | ≈1,600,000 est. | ≈1 in 917 | 1.1M | Shankar | 279 |
| BD Bangladesh | #840 | ≈7,500 est. | ≈1 in 23K | — | Shankar | 43 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈2,700 est. | ≈1 in 106K | — | Shankar | 36 |
| MY Malaysia | — | ≈2,200 est. | ≈1 in 16K | — | Shankar | 44 |
| PK Pakistan | — | ≈1,500 est. | ≈1 in 172K | — | Shankar | 27 |
| US United States | — | 1,352as Shankar | 1 in 246K | 3.3K | Shankar | 299 |
| KW Kuwait | — | ≈440 est. | ≈1 in 11K | — | Sankara | 5 |
| SG Singapore | — | ≈270 est. | ≈1 in 23K | — | Shankar | 31 |
| AO Angola | #505 | ≈200 est. | ≈1 in 193K | — | Shankar | 3 |
| GY Guyana | #907 | 56as Shankar | 1 in 13K | 56 | Shankar | 6 |
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: This page discusses the most common names in India based on an analysis of election and census data, published by Housen; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; 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)Sankara 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.
In Latvian, apdzīvota vieta Lielbritānijā (Sanquhar), Skotijā, Nitas kreisajā krastā
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)- Thomas Sankarab. 1949BFPresident of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987
- Mariam Sankarab. 1953BFpolitician
- Bénéwendé Stanislas Sankarab. 1959BFBurkinabe politician
- Odile Sankarab. 1963BFBurkinabè filmmaker
- Mamadou Sankarab. 1995NGassociation football player
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)27 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 18 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 2K | #1,951 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 326 | #12,583 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (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
- Is Sankara a male or female name?
- Sankara is a male name. National registers that list it by sex list it as male: India (India Names Dataset) and United States (Census Bureau, 2020).
- In which country does Sankara have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.6 million people named Shankar in India, more than in any other country we hold.
- How common is the name Sankara?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,352 people named Shankar in 2020, about 1 in 246 thousand residents.
- How common is Sankara compared with other names?
- In India, Sankara is the 36th most common given name of 3,760,348 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Sankara?
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/sankaraThe 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, “Sankara” — the 36th most common given name in India. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.