German name generator

Germany has no official baby-name count, so the best figures come from the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache, which collected 831,298 names from 749 registry offices, about 91% of all first names given in 2025. It counts spellings that sound alike together. Sophia and Noah came first. Marie topped the list of all names given but missed the first-name top ten, because it is so often a second name.

Most babies get one name: in 2025, 63.7% had one first name and 33.2% had two. Regions differ: Ida and Frieda were favourites in the north, Luisa and Felix in the south, and the GfdS puts the south's more biblical names down to religion. Austria's 2025 leaders were Emma and Noah, and Switzerland's Sofia and Noah.

German names go in and out of fashion fast, so a first name tells you roughly when someone was born. Knud Bielefeld has reconstructed the top names of every decade since 1900 from birth announcements; it is his own research, not an official count. The Born in the setting uses his top ten for each decade. Two of each:

Fixed surnames spread from the 12th century, first among nobles and in towns. According to Wikipedia, occupational names are the most common kind, and the top of the list is a medieval village: miller, smith, tailor, fisherman, weaver. Others describe a person (Klein, small), give an origin (Bayer, from Bavaria) or come from a first name. The twenty most common, by German Wikipedia's ranking:

Where a family lived shows in its name. Meyer outranks Müller in Lower Saxony, and Huber is the most common name in southern Bavaria outside Munich. Patronymics in -sen, like Hansen and Petersen, are northern; the German surname atlas finds names in -inger concentrated in the south and about 110,000 people with eastern names in -ow, such as Bülow and Grabow. Low German in the north never took part in the High German sound shift, which is why the priest is Pfaff in the south and Pape in the north; the tailor is Schneider in the south and often Schröder in the north. Hyphenated surnames are still rarer in the east, because East German law banned double names.

When ä, ö and ü cannot be typed, German writes them ae, oe and ue, and ß becomes ss. Dropping the dots altogether is wrong: Muller is not Müller. Passports keep the real letters in the printed name but spell them out in the machine-readable line, so Müller becomes MUELLER and Groß becomes GROSS, and German name law treats writing u for ü as a change of name. Some families kept the old e spelling for good, as in Goethe.

Germany abolished the privileges of nobility in 1919. Article 109 of the Weimar Constitution made titles part of the name, so the title moved inside it: Graf Kasimir von der Recke became Kasimir Graf von der Recke. Titles still change for women: a Freiherr's wife is Freifrau and his unmarried daughter Freiin, and a Graf's wife and daughter are Gräfin. Von usually named where a family came from and zu that it still held the estate; von und zu means both. Von alone proves nothing, since 200 to 300 ordinary surnames contain it, and indexes ignore both title and particle, filing Ludwig von Mises under M. Austria went further in 1919 and abolished titles and von altogether.

No German law lists the names you may give. Instead the registry office checks that a name is recognisable as a first name and not ridiculous or demeaning. The GfdS adds that surnames, everyday words and the names of animals or objects are not accepted, while invented names can pass if they look like first names. Since a 2008 Federal Constitutional Court ruling a first name no longer has to show the child's sex, though a name clearly belonging to the other sex is still refused. Two names joined by a hyphen count as one first name.

Surnames changed on 1 May 2025. A child can now have a double surname from both parents, of two parts at most, with or without a hyphen, and children born earlier can switch, with their consent from age five, according to the Federal Foreign Office. Set Surname to Double for names like this, or use the tools above for a real family.