Yoruba

given name · Latin script

Meaning: Yoruba people/language: the meeting place

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Yoruba is a given name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.

rarermore common
  • NGNigeria
  • USUnited States
  • EGEgypt

Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Yoruba people/language: the meeting place.

Sources 1

  • African Names

Where in the world(measured from records)

Recorded in:

No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.

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)

Yoruba 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.

  • In English, A member of an ethnic group or tribe living mainly in southwest Nigeria, southern Benin, and eastern Togo and, as well as in communities elsewhere in West Africa, United States, Brazil and Cuba.

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

  • In English, people, lang., Africa

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  • In Yoruba, Yoruba (people or ethnicity)

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

  • In Portuguese, alternative form of iorubá

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

  • In French, the Yoruba language

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

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)

1940196019802000Biodun Jeyifo, b. 1946Yoruba Richen, b. 1972Yoruba Pinto, b. 1985Abideen Olasupo, b. 1993
  • Biodun Jeyifob. 1946NGnot in their usual nameNigerian lecturer
  • Yoruba Richenb. 1972USAmerican film director and film producer
  • Yoruba Pintob. 1985PTAngolan-São Toméan and Portuguese association football player
  • Abideen Olasupob. 1993NGnot in their usual nameNigerian entrepreneur

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 4 sources across 2 countries.

Official registers attesting Yoruba
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)19727—
US United StatesSSA — National Baby Names (1880–present)19746—
NL NetherlandsBabynamen — Lijst met meer dan 22.000 namen (Amelia King, 2020)———

Reference works 2

  • Wikipedia given-name 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

What does the name Yoruba mean, and where does it come from?
Yoruba people/language: the meeting place. Recorded by African Names.
Is Yoruba a male or female name?
Yoruba is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
What are other forms of the name Yoruba?
In the etymology graph, Biodun, Boluwaji and Olusayo are forms of the same name in other languages.
In which country does Yoruba have the most bearers?
Yoruba is most frequently recorded in the United States.

What do you want to know about Yoruba?

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

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, “Yoruba”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Yoruba parses inside a full name →