Tamara
given name · Latin script
Meaning, in English: A female given name from Hebrew, regularly used in English since the mid-twentieth century
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/təˈmɑɹə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Tamara is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Georgia it is the 5th most common given name.
- LVLatvia1 in 408(measured from records)
- UAUkraine≈1 in 752
- ARArgentina≈1 in 1.3K
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 Tamara itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- #447 (measured from records)
- 9 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 554 (measured from records)
- 1 in 157 (inferred from the name graph)
128,711 people, 2020
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Moldova
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled תמרה in UA Ukraine, LV Latvia, תמר in IL Israel and Tamar in GE Georgia.
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)
Russian: probably derived from the Hebrew name Tamar, from a vocabulary word meaning ‘date palm’, with the addition of the feminine suffix -a: The name Tamar is borne in the Bible by two female characters: the daughter-in-law of Judah, who is involved in a somewhat seamy story of sexual intrigue (Genesis 38), and a daughter of King David (2
Sources 1
- A concise dictionary of first names
Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.
How Tamara is read(measured from records)
Tamara is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English52%
A female given name from Hebrew, regularly used in English since the mid-twentieth century.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Spanish19%
Hebreo thamar ‘palmera de dátiles’
as a nameDiccionario etimológico de nombres propios
- Ukrainian10%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Tamara in Ukrainian.
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Tamara 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | #302 | 128,711 | 1 in 2.6K | 129K | Tamara | 554 |
| UA Ukraine | #608 | ≈58,000 est. | ≈1 in 752 | — | תמרה | 63 |
| BR Brazil | #547 | 44,519 | 1 in 4.8K | 49K | Tamara | 157 |
| AR Argentina | #270 | ≈36,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | 52 | Tamara | 123 |
| ES Spain | #127 | 33,862 | 1 in 1.5K | 34K | Tamara | 179 |
| GE Georgia | #5 | 28,673as თამარი | 1 in 139 | 29K | Tamar | 123 |
| MD Moldova | #385 | 21,415 | 1 in 157 | 21K | Tamara | 26 |
| IL Israel | #31 | ≈21,000 est. | ≈1 in 405 | 506 | תמר | 117 |
| LV Latvia | #103 | 4,606 | 1 in 408 | 4.6K | תמרה | 19 |
128,711 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; CBS Israel — Family names in Israel, 2017 ("שמות משפחה בישראל 2017"); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Georgia PSDA/SDA civil-registry name statistics (per-token API); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); IBGE — Nomes (census name API); e-services.md — living population register; PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population 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)
Tamara is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
Russian: probably derived from the Hebrew name Tamar, from a vocabulary word meaning ‘date palm’, with the addition of the feminine suffix -a: The name Tamar is borne in the Bible by two female characters: the daughter-in-law of Judah, who is involved in a somewhat seamy story of sexual intrigue (Genesis 38), and a daughter of King David (2
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
2 From Hebrew: ‘date palm’. See main dictionary. Tanya @ Pet form of TATYANA.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In Swedish, Tamara är en rysk form av det hebreiska tāmār ’dadelpalm’ (en symbol för skönhet). Även namnformen Tamar finns i Sverige.
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
In Romanian, < ebr. Thamar, n. de femeie In V. Testament. 1. State, §etrar (I Div); Tamaru, Z. (ib).
as a nameDictionar Onomastic Rominesc
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)
- Tamara Karsavinab. 1885RURussian ballet dancer
- Tamara de Lempickab. 1898PLPolish painter (1894-1980)
- Tamara Makarovab. 1907RUSoviet film actress, drama teacher (1907–1997)
- Tamara Pressb. 1937RUSoviet track-and-field athlete (1937-2021)
- Tamara Bykovab. 1958RUSoviet high jumper
- Tamara E. Jerniganb. 1959USastronaut
- Tamara Tunieb. 1959USAmerican actress (1959-)
- Tamara Gverdtsitelib. 1962GEGeorgian-Russian singer, actress and composer
- Tamara Taylorb. 1970CACanadian actress (born 1970)
- Tamara Todevskab. 1985MKMacedonian singer
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 130 sources across 63 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 129K | #439 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Nomes (census name API) | — | 49K | #788 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2022 | 45K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 44K | #610 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 34K | #231 |
| ES Spain | INE — Nombres más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 33K | #129 |
| MD Moldova | e-services.md — living population register | — | 21K | #57 |
| LV Latvia | PMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register) | — | 1.2K | — |
| LV Latvia | PMLP — Personvārdu meklētājs (per-name population-register lookup) | — | 1.2K | #383 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | 2020 | 474 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 184 | #610 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 129 | #439 |
Reference works 7
- 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)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Ismlar.com — Uzbek given-name dictionary (meanings, gender, origin)
- 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
- How do you pronounce Tamara?
- A machine transcription gives /təˈmɑɹə/ (IPA) for English.
- Where does the name Tamara come from?
- Russian: probably derived from the Hebrew name Tamar, from a vocabulary word meaning ‘date palm’, with the addition of the feminine suffix -a: The name Tamar is borne in the Bible by two female charac… Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names.
- Is Tamara a male or female name?
- Tamara 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 Tamara have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 129 thousand people named Tamara, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled tamara.
- Where is Tamara most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Tamara is densest in Moldova — about 1 in 157 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- What are other forms of the name Tamara?
- In the etymology graph, Tami, Tammie and Tamar are forms of the same name in other languages; Tammy is a recorded short or pet form.
- What does the name Tamara mean?
- In English, A female given name from Hebrew, regularly used in English since the mid-twentieth century.
- How common is the name Tamara?
- In the United States, the national register counted 128,711 people named Tamara in 2020, about 1 in 2.6 thousand residents.
- How common is Tamara compared with other names?
- In the United States, Tamara is the 302nd most common given name of 2,815,431 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Tamara?
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/tamaraThe 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, “Tamara” — the 302nd most common given name in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.