Most Common Names in the Gulf: Baby Names in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Kuwait's Population List (Official Data)

Most lists circulating as "the Gulf's most popular baby names" rest on no source at all. The official data, meanwhile, is scattered: each country has published a different year, a different group of people and a list of different length. Here we give only the lists released by official bodies (mostly through the press) and state next to each one exactly what it measures.

First, the data IDs

* Only a separate UAE report gives approximate yearly figures for citizens; that is why the tables show ranks, not counts.

Saudi Arabia: the Hijri 1441 list

The Civil Affairs Agency of the Ministry of Interior announced the ten girls' and ten boys' names most often given to newborns in the Hijri year 1441 (roughly August 2019 – August 2020). It is the most recent official list we could find; we did not use the unsourced "current" lists that circulate online.

Girls' names

Boys' names

Among boys, Salman comes first and Muhammad second; three of the ten names are compounds built on Abd- ("servant"). All ten girls' names have three or four letters in Arabic script, and Fatima, Maryam and Aisha are absent from this list.

UAE: the top three of 2022

When the Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre (FCSC) released the 2022 birth figures in October 2024 (96,631 births in total), it also named the top three girls' and boys' names.

An older FCSC report, reported in the press in December 2020, gives approximate yearly figures for Emirati citizens (period not stated): Muhammad 1,703, Zayed 1,362, Abdullah 946; Maryam 875, Fatima 851, Sheikha 640. Because the two sets cover different groups, we do not read them as a trend.

Kuwait: a population list, not a baby list

The Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI) data shows the most common names among all persons registered at the end of June 2026. In other words it covers people of every age, not newborns. Only the first place was stated explicitly; the others follow the order of the news report.

Meanings of the names not shown above: Sara (سارة): Lady, princess, noblewoman; Munira (منيرة): Bright, radiant (feminine of Munir); Dalal (دلال): Coquetry, being cherished; Sheikha (شيخة): Feminine of sheikh (word meaning: elderly woman); Reem (ريم): White antelope; Dana (دانة): Large, beautiful pearl; Ahmad (أحمد): Most praised (superlative of Hamid); Yusuf (يوسف): Arabic form of Joseph, a prophet named in the Qur'an; Nasser (ناصر): Helper, supporter. PACI's previous release, in May 2025, had the same top three.

Qatar, Oman and Bahrain

As far as we could find, there is no verifiable official name list for any of these three countries. For Qatar we came across only old press reports (2010 census, 2009 births) that we could not check against an official publication, so we have not used them either; nor have we used the unsourced rankings that circulate.

Shared names: which name appears in how many lists?

Names that appear in at least two lists (number = rank in that list). The columns belong to different years and data types: the Saudi and UAE columns are births, the Kuwait column is a population list (there the number is the list order).

Girls' names

Boys' names

• Muhammad and Abdullah are in all four lists; Muhammad is first in three of them.
• Maryam and Fatima are always in the top two in the UAE and Kuwait lists, yet absent from the Saudi 1441 girls' list.

Can these lists be compared? Three questions

Fatima is first in Kuwait; so do Kuwaiti parents mostly name their daughters Fatima? We cannot tell: the list covers the whole population, and the order among newborns may differ.

Maryam is missing from the Saudi list; has the name fallen out of favour there? The data does not show that: we have one year's top ten and no counts.

So what can be said? Muhammad, Abdullah, Fatima and Maryam keep reappearing in lists from different years and of different types; but that is not a share or a rate.

The Abjad window

We compute each value from the established Arabic spelling of the name: letters are counted plainly, ة counts 5, a final ى counts 10, an alif with hamza counts 1. Abdullah written as one word (عبدالله) or two (عبد الله) is 142 either way.

• Highest: of the 33 names, Ghina (غنى) is highest at 1060; 1000 of that comes from a single letter, غ. The same value holds for al-Ghani (غني), one of the names of God.
• Lowest: Zayed (زايد) at 22.
• Same root: Ahmad (أحمد) 53 and Muhammad (محمد) 92 both come from the root ح-م-د, "praise".
• Spelling: Malak (ملك) is 90; spelled ملاك it becomes 91, the same as Layan (ليان). No spelling is more blessed than another; the spelling simply has to be settled first.
• First letters: in the Saudi 1441 list, five of the ten girls' names and five of the ten boys' names begin with an Earth letter (ح، د، ل، غ، ر، ع، خ). This follows the classical classification used on our site; some authors use a different classification.

A name's number on its own is not an analysis. In the Abjad tradition what matters is the balance the name's letters and elements strike with the mother's and father's names; for the child's star chart (yildizname) the mother's name also enters the calculation. The same Maryam can complete a missing element in one family and add to an already dominant one in another.

What are these lists good for when choosing a name?

Official lists show how common a name is, not whether it suits your family. Meaning, correct spelling and harmony with the family's names are the real parts of the decision.

This article is for information only. Abjad interpretations rest on tradition and contain no definitive judgement or guarantee about any name.

Sources: Saudi Ministry of Interior, Civil Affairs Agency (Hijri 1441 list), Ajel, 9 October 2020; UAE Federal Competitiveness and Statistics Centre (FCSC), 2022 birth data, Emarat Alyoum, 22 October 2024, and FCSC report, Emarat Alyoum, 12 December 2020; Kuwait Public Authority for Civil Information (PACI), most common names in the registered population (June 2026), Al-Rai, 22 July 2026. The UAE citizen figures are approximate yearly values.