Popular Baby Names in the Levant: Jordan, Palestine and the Region (Official Data)

Search for "the most popular baby names in the Levant" and most of the lists you find have no source. This article does the opposite: country by country, we look at what official bodies in Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and also Iraq and Yemen (outside the Levant) have published or announced to the press, and we say plainly which data exists and which does not. We do not invent rankings or estimate counts that were never released.

First, a map of the data

The table below shows the official data we could reach at a glance. Periods, coverage and level of detail differ, so these lists cannot be added together into a single "regional ranking".

Jordan: the region's only current series

Jordan is the only country in the Levant for which we could find official baby-name data for 2023, 2024 and 2025. The figures come from the CSPD annual report and statements by its director general, and they cover births of Jordanian citizens nationwide. Total births were announced as 155,808 for 2024 and 151,577 for 2025. Because the full tables in the reports were published as images, we can only use the names reported in the press. We cover each year's list in detail in separate articles; here is a short summary of the names in the 2024 and 2025 lists.

Girls' names

The number in brackets is the number of babies given the name; "—" means the name is not in that year's published list. Misk is first in all three years; 278 more babies were given the name in 2024 than in 2023 (2,356 → 2,634). Ayla is a name of Turkish origin and appears only in the 2024 list.

Boys' names

In both years with published counts, Muhammad was given to more than twice as many babies as the second name: 6,780 in 2023 (second, Adam: 2,765) and 6,253 in 2024 (second, Yusuf: 2,506). Shahm was 6th in 2023 and 4th in 2024, but is not in the published top five for 2025. The word goes back to a verb meaning "to be clever, strong, firm"; a separate meaning as a given name could not be confirmed in our sources.

Palestine: an official report and a press report

For Palestine there is one official report and one press report, and neither gives a current ranking. The data is limited.

• West Bank, 2011: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) compiled the names of babies born in the West Bank in 2011 in a 50-page report published in November 2012. The report is official, but it is old and covers the West Bank only. We therefore do not present its ranking as today's "Palestinian list".
• Gaza, February 2024: according to a February 2024 report by Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (The New Arab), citing a source at the Interior Ministry in Gaza, more than 20,000 births had been registered since the war began and these babies had been given more than 250 different names. Names such as "Gaza" (غزة) and "Watan", homeland (وطن), were mentioned as examples; no ranking or counts of names were published, and the figures could not be checked against an official publication.

The name lists in Israel's population statistics refer to births registered in Israel; as they are not Palestinian data, they are not used in this article.

Syria: a gap in the registers

We found no current nationwide baby-name list for Syria. According to Al-Quds Al-Arabi, civil registry offices were closed from December 2024 until July 2025. A five-year list shared by the local administration in Idlib in 2022 does exist, but it covers that area only and does not represent Syria as a whole, so we have left it out of the table.

Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen: no official list

As far as we could find, no official body in these three countries has published a baby-name ranking. That does not mean the names are unknown; it means there is no official list with a clear source. We do not use "top 10" lists that give no source.

Where do the lists overlap?

We counted shared names by script, using only the names that were published. Two caveats: the 2024 and 2025 lists are so short that "not in the list" does not necessarily mean a name has fallen; and the lists of other Arab countries cover different years and different kinds of data.

• In Jordan in all three years: Misk, Watin, Salma and Maryam for girls; Muhammad, Yusuf and Omar for boys.
• In other Arab lists too: Muhammad, Maryam, Ahmad, Yusuf and Adam each appear in at least two of the lists we hold for Tunisia (2020–2022), Algeria (ten-year periods), the UAE (2022), Kuwait (registered population, not births) and Saudi Arabia (Hijri 1441). Muhammad is in all five.
• Only in Jordan: Misk, Watin, Salma, Ayla, Omar and Shahm appear in none of those other lists. In other words, the names that share the girls' top three in Jordan are absent from the other official Arab lists we could compare.

The Abjad angle

We calculate Abjad values from the established Arabic spelling of the name, counting the letters as written: an alif with hamza or madda counts 1, a doubled letter (shadda) is not counted twice, and a final ى counts 10 like ي. When the spelling changes, the value may change too; no spelling is more auspicious than another.

• The weight of one letter: among the 46 names in Jordan's 2023 lists, the highest value is 1510, for Ghaith (غيث, "rain"); 1000 of it comes from a single letter, غ. Second is Ghazal (غزل, 1037), which also begins with غ. The lowest is 21, for Zayd (زيد).
• Same number, different names: in the 2023 lists, Sama, Aylin and Sila meet at 101; Mira and Amir at 251; Selin and Sultan at 150. The same value is not the same reading: the order of the letters and their elements differ.
• Spelling matters: the press report of the 2023 list printed Watin as "تين"; the correct spelling is وتين. Without the initial و the value drops from 466 to 460. Abdullah, written عبد الله or joined as عبدالله, is 142 either way; a space is not a letter.

A name's Abjad value on its own is not the analysis. In the Abjad tradition, what matters is how the name's letters and elements balance with the parents' names; for the baby's star chart (yıldızname), the mother's name is also taken into account. A name at the top of the list can complete a missing element in one family and add to an already dominant one in another.

Three questions before trusting a list

1. Which year? There are 14 years between Jordan's 2025 list and the West Bank's 2011 report; putting them side by side does not mean they measure the same thing.
2. Whose records? Newborns or the whole population? Kuwait's list, for example, covers all registered people; it is not a baby-name ranking.
3. Who published it? An official body, or a site with no clear source? A ranking without a source line is not solid ground for choosing a name.

Popularity is only one piece of information when choosing a name. 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 are based on tradition and contain no definitive judgement or guarantee about any name.

Source: Jordan Civil Status and Passports Department (CSPD) annual report and statements, as reported in the press (Akhbar Hayat, Ammon, Khaberni, Factjo); Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), "Names of newborns in the West Bank 2011" (November 2012); Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (The New Arab), February 2024, citing a source at the Interior Ministry in Gaza; Al-Quds Al-Arabi on Syria's civil registry offices. Jordanian figures refer to births of Jordanian citizens.