How popular is the baby name Mohammad in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Use the popularity graph and data table below to find out! Plus, see all the blog posts that mention the name Mohammad.

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Popularity of the baby name Mohammad


Posts that mention the name Mohammad

Popular baby names in Norway, 2017

Flag of Norway
Flag of Norway

According to Statistics Norway, the most popular baby names in Norway in 2017 were Sofie/Sophie and Jakob/Jacob.

Here are Norway’s top 10 girl names and top 10 boy names of 2017:

Girl Names
1. Sofie/Sophie, 412 baby girls
2. Nora/Norah, 405
3. Emma, 380
4. Sara/Sahra/Sarah/Zara, 346
5. Ella, 319
6. Olivia, 316
7. Maja/Maia/Maya, 312
8. Emilie, 285
9. Sofia/Sophia, 272
10. Ingrid/Ingerid/Ingri, 272

Boy Names
1. Jakob/Jacob, 424 baby boys
2. Lucas/Lukas, 404
3. Emil, 397
4. Oskar/Oscar, 393
5. Oliver, 390
6. William, 383
7. Filip/Fillip/Philip/Phillip, 382
8. Noah/Noa, 368
9. Elias, 349
10. Isak/Isaac/Isac, 330

The girls’ top 10 is the same, but the names are in a different order.

In the boys’ top 10, Elias and Isak replaced Mathias and Aksel.

In the capital city of Oslo, the top names were Mohammad and Sofia. Statistics Norway said that it doesn’t have a “good explanation” for why Sofia-with-an-A is #1 in the capital while Sofie-with-an-E is #1 in the country.

In 2016, the top names were Nora/Norah/Noora and William.

Sources: Navn – SSB, These are Norway’s most popular kids’ names, Most popular names in 2017

Image: Adapted from Flag of Norway (public domain)

Where did the baby name Soraya come from in 1955?

Soraya and the Shah

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, married three times (and divorced twice). His second wife was the half-Iranian, half-German Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari. They wed in Tehran in 1951.

Soraya’s first name is the Persian form of Thurayya, from the Arabic term al-Thurayya, which refers to the Pleiades star cluster (literally, “the many little ones”).

From December of 1954 to February of 1955, the imperial couple paid a long visit to the U.S., traveling to several different locations: Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Sun Valley (Idaho), and New York City. And (as with Twiggy and Nikita) the press coverage of their trip led to the debut of the name Soraya on the U.S. baby name charts in 1955:

  • 1961: 39 baby girls named Soraya
  • 1960: 24 baby girls named Soraya
  • 1959: 20 baby girls named Soraya
  • 1958: 28 baby girls named Soraya
  • 1957: 6 baby girls named Soraya
  • 1956: unlisted
  • 1955: 6 baby girls named Soraya [debut]
  • 1954: unlisted
  • 1953: unlisted

Usage jumped in 1958, the year the Shah divorced Soraya (because she wasn’t able to produce an heir). And it stayed relatively high after that, because the U.S. press continued to report on the “sad queen” for years to come — her travels, her rumored romances, her attempt to kick off acting career in the mid-1960s.

What do you think of the name Soraya?

(And who were the Shah’s other two wives? The first was an Egyptian princess named Fawzia, sister-in-law of Farida, and the third was an Iranian commoner named Farah who we’ll talk more about tomorrow…)

Sources:

Iraqi baby names during and after the rule of Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein statue being toppled in Baghdad's Firdos Square (April, 2003)
Saddam Hussein statue being toppled

When the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began in March of 2003, tens of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq fled from their cities and villages and took shelter in the hills.

One of these displaced Kurdish families included a boy named Awara, which means “refugee.” His older brother said Awara’s name would be changed to Azad, or “freedom,” once it was safe for the family to return to their home village.

By April, Saddam Hussein was out of power.

And along with the change in regime came a change in baby naming trends. The name “Saddam” and the names of Saddam Hussein’s children (e.g., Udai, Kusai, Rajad, Halla), which had been trendy up to that point, quickly fell out of favor. An employee of Iraq’s National Registry in Baghdad said in late 2003, “We haven’t had even one Saddam since the fall of the regime on April 9th.”

Instead, Iraqi parents started opting for other namesakes. The director of the National Registry mentioned that more than 20 babies had been named for religious leader (and Hussein enemy) Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim after he was assassinated in August, for example.

I couldn’t find any follow-up articles about Awara’s family, though, so I don’t know if they ever made it back to their village, or whether Awara’s name was finally changed from “refugee” to “freedom.”

Sources:

Image: Statue of Saddam being toppled in Firdos Square after the invasion

Name news from Saudi Arabia

Three bits of name news out of Saudi Arabia…

First:

The most circulated [baby] names in the Kingdom include Mohammad, Fahd, Abdullah, Abdulrahman, Turki, Bandar, Omar, Ali, Fatima, Aisha, Nora, Hessa, Sheikha, and Maha.

Unfortunately the article didn’t specify exactly which year (or years) this list covers.

Second:

Unusual or rare [baby] names have been reduced due to the work of authorities across the Kingdom who have enacted regulations to curb exotic or strange names.

Some of the baby names no longer being used are…

  • Faziah, female name meaning “one who is afraid”
  • Mureibah, female name, “fearful”
  • Najar, male name
  • Rashash, male name, “a gun machine”
  • Zaqam, male name meaning “to do with the mouth” (…?)

Third:

Saudi society is facing a new phenomenon in which many young people are changing their names to be in tune with the latest name trends, Al-Hayat newspaper reported.

Several of the name changes mentioned in the article:

  • Fatimah to Hadeel (woman, 22 years old)
    • “I used the name Hadeel for my social media account before I changed it officially with the Civil Status Department.”
  • Salem to Faris (man, 27 years old)
  • Ethar to Maria (woman, 31 years old)
  • Nouf to Naifah (woman, age not mentioned)

Sources: