Shafia
given name · Latin script
Meaning: mediatress; fem. of Shafi
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ʃæfɪə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Shafia is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Pakistan than in any other country.
- PKPakistan≈1 in 48K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 1.3M
- BDBangladesh≈1 in 65K
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.
- Pakistan (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 99 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 48K (inferred from the name graph)
≈4,800 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Pakistan, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
mediatress; fem. of Shafi
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of Muslim Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Shafia 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PK Pakistan | ≈4,800 est. | ≈1 in 48K | listed | Shafia | 34 |
| BD Bangladesh | ≈2,500 est. | ≈1 in 65K | — | Shafia | 31 |
| US United States | 258 | 1 in 1.3M | 252 | Shafia | 99 |
| NG Nigeria | ≈140 est. | ≈1 in 1.5M | — | Shafia | 3 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈130 est. | ≈1 in 489K | 17 | Shafia | 58 |
| MY Malaysia | ≈85 est. | ≈1 in 386K | — | Shafia | 9 |
| AE United Arab Emirates | ≈60 est. | ≈1 in 166K | — | Shafia | 20 |
| QA Qatar | ≈6 est. | ≈1 in 422K | — | Shafia | 13 |
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: the pk-muslim-names-cc0 register; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register). 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)
Shafia 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 Arabic, mediatress; fem. of Shafi. See Shafi (m.)
as a nameA Dictionary of Muslim Names
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)
- Ehsan ShafiaIRresearcher
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)
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 26 sources across 16 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 252 | #32,550 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 6 | #32,550 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2015 | 5 | — |
| PK Pakistan | Muslim given names (CC0) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Shafia mean, and where does it come from?
- mediatress; fem. of Shafi Recorded by A Dictionary of Muslim Names.
- How do you pronounce Shafia?
- A machine transcription gives /ʃæfɪə/ (IPA) for Urdu.
- Is Shafia a male or female name?
- Shafia 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 Shafia have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 4.8 thousand people named Shafia in Pakistan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled shafia.
- How common is the name Shafia?
- In the United States, the national register counted 258 people named Shafia in 2020, about 1 in 1.3 million residents.
What do you want to know about Shafia?
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/shafiaThe 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, “Shafia”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.