Greek Names

What are the most common names among Greek women and men? This page attempts to answer that question through statistical analysis of a sample of 97,072 individuals — to our knowledge, one of the largest samples published online on this subject (April 2009).

Beyond the name rankings themselves, the study also aims to highlight certain elementary statistical issues. Questions that at first glance appear simple often do not admit a "right or wrong" type of answer.

How to read the table. Male names are distinguished from female names through color coding. The "Occurrences" column records the number of appearances of each name within the sample. The "Estimate / 10M" column corresponds to the expected number of bearers of the name within a population of 10,000,000 (assuming 5 million per gender; the purely Greek population was estimated at around 10 million in 2009, excluding immigrants). The "95% CI" column provides the corresponding confidence interval, i.e. the minimum and maximum expected number of individuals at a 95% confidence level.

The sample was drawn from the data of 97,072 participants in a competition of ASEP (Supreme Council for Civil Personnel Selection) (autumn 2008; results published March 2009). The ASEP website published the results in Excel files, split into 5–6 alphabetical segments (due to the 65,536-row limit per worksheet). These segments were merged into a single text file; the tallying was performed using specialized software.

How representative is this sample? Since the focus is on the names of Greek citizens (and not immigrants), the answer appears positive: as a rule, immigrants do not participate in recruitment competitions for the Greek public sector. A few "non-typical Greek" names do appear in the table (Greek citizens of Muslim culture or with a foreign parent), but they occur at very low frequencies. Note that names written in Latin characters were excluded (their inclusion would have raised the sample to 103,247 individuals), as were names with a single occurrence; including them would have nearly doubled the size of the table.

The significant predominance of women in the sample (more than double the men) comes as no surprise: the security provided, at least until 2009, by a public sector position attracted disproportionately more women.

Regarding the methodological significance of this imbalance: a direct comparison of occurrences between a male and a female name within the sample is not appropriate (e.g., it is meaningless to state "there are more Elenis than Giorgoses" based on sample numbers). Comparison between genders is only possible through the population estimates: at 95% confidence, the upper expected number of Elenis (~302,000) falls short of the lower number of Georgioses (~511,000). Conversely, it cannot be established whether the Georgioses outnumber the Marias. Names of the same gender, of course, can be freely compared even within the sample.