Names of Germany DE

The names that most distinguish Germany from the rest of the world are Schmidt, Wolfgang and Jürgen; in our record corpus the commonest names held in Germany are Michael and Müller.

Written in German.

Population
80M
Official registers
1
Name forms recorded
236K
BBuilt from 1 official register, 4 sub-national, 236,331 name forms in our corpus, 11 cited works.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of Germany are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, Germany included.

How names work in Germany

3 naming traditions are in use in Germany, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.

The most common names in Germany

Characteristic of Germany

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when Germany holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.

WolfgangJürgenKlausHaftungsbeschränktPeterManfredSachsenChristianAndreasMarkusDieterBerndMatthiasGerhardWernerUweHansSabineJosefHeinz
Sized by how much of the difference between Germany's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.(measured from records)

Scripts & spelling

GmbHsurname(measured from records)
Stefangiven name(measured from records)
Michaelgiven name(measured from records)
Thomasgiven name(measured from records)
Andreasgiven name(measured from records)
The best-attested names in Germany, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

Countries whose names look alike

Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.

Registers & sources

Official registers

Sub-national registers

4 registers for Germany publish regional lists only (Stadt München Standesamt — Vornamenstatistik PDF (official publication); Stadt Düsseldorf Open Data — Vornamen Neugeborene; Stadt Leipzig Open Data — Vornamensstatistik Neugeborene; Stadt München Open Data — Vornamen von Nulljährigen). A regional list is not a national one, and summing regions would be an aggregate the publisher never made, so no figure on this page comes from them.

Cited works

Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.

About this data

Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.

Data snapshot: 2026-10-09.

Questions

Is there one naming system in Germany?
No — 3 are described on this page (German, Romansh, Luxembourgish), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of Germany”, https://mondonomo.ai/names/DE (data snapshot 2026-10-09).