Sikh and Punjabi baby names, and how Singh and Kaur work

Punjabi and Sikh are not the same category

Punjabi is a language and a region. The Punjab is split between India and Pakistan, and Punjabi speakers are Sikh, Hindu and Muslim. Sikhism is a religion, and most but not all Sikhs are Punjabi. A list that treats the two words as interchangeable will hand a Muslim Punjabi family a set of names from the Guru Granth Sahib and a Sikh family in Malaysia a set of Hindu names, and both will be wrong. This page covers the Sikh naming tradition, which is specific and structured, and then the wider Punjabi vocabulary that Sikh, Hindu and Muslim families all draw on.

The structural fact: the given name carries no gender

This is the single most important thing to understand, and it is the opposite of how English naming works. In Sikh practice the given name is not male or female. Simran, Harpreet, Jasleen, Manpreet, Navjot and Amrit are given to girls and to boys. What distinguishes them is what comes after: Singh, meaning lion, for men, and Kaur for women. Britannica's account of the Khalsa records the decision directly — when Guru Gobind Singh instituted the Khalsa in 1699, the men of the community took Singh and the women took Kaur.

Kaur's own etymology is less settled than Singh's. It is commonly rendered as "princess", and that is the gloss you will meet everywhere, but the derivation is debated and some accounts connect it to a word meaning prince used without gender, precisely so that women were not defined in relation to men. We give the usual translation and flag that it is not uncontested.

One consequence catches British forms out constantly. Singh and Kaur are not surnames in the English sense. Many Sikh families use them as the only name after the given name; others place a family or ancestral name after them. Part of the original point was to displace caste surnames altogether, and the Sikh code of conduct maintained by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee continues to discourage their use.

How the name is chosen

The naming ceremony is the naam karan, held at the gurdwara. The Guru Granth Sahib is opened at random, a hukamnama is read, and the first letter of the first word of that verse becomes the letter the child's name must begin with. The family then chooses a name starting with that letter, and the granthi announces it to the congregation, with Singh or Kaur added.

This is a genuinely different decision from the one most British parents make. The letter arrives before the name does, and the shortlist a family had assembled may become irrelevant in a minute. It is also why so many Sikh siblings have names beginning with different letters and why name-choosing conversations in Sikh families often revolve around letters rather than names. The same instinct that produces the practice — that the choice should not be entirely the parents' — is the reason the ceremony happens at the gurdwara rather than at home.

The elements Sikh names are built from

Sikh names are usually compounds, and the elements are drawn from the vocabulary of Gurbani, the scriptural writings. Learn six elements and most of these names become readable.

Read that way, Gurpreet is love of the Guru, Harjit is victory of God, Sukhdeep is the lamp of peace or comfort. Simran, from the Sanskrit root for remembrance, is the practice of meditative remembrance of God, and is a name in its own right. Amrit is the sweetened water used in the Khalsa initiation and means the nectar of immortality. Anmol is priceless; Ekam is one, pointing at the oneness of God with which the Guru Granth Sahib opens.

Punjabi names outside the Sikh tradition

Punjabi Hindu families use much of the same vocabulary alongside Sanskrit-derived names, and Punjabi Muslim families in Pakistan draw on the Arabic and Persian repertoire while speaking the same language. Names such as Preet, Rajveer, Simran and Jeevan cross those lines easily; names such as Gurpreet and Harjit generally do not, because they name the Guru. Being clear about which is which is a matter of accuracy rather than etiquette.

What the official statistics can and cannot tell you

The ONS publishes every name given to three or more babies in England and Wales, so all of these names appear in the 2025 full lists released on 9 July 2026. But the office ranks exact spellings and does not merge them, and it has explained why: choosing which spellings to combine would take the statistics into subjective judgement. For Punjabi names that matters more than for most, because Simran, Simrun and Simeran, or Harpreet and Harpreet Kaur, are counted apart. Any figure you read for a Sikh name in the British data is therefore a floor rather than a total.

Where these names appear in Britain

Sikhs have been settled in Britain since the nineteenth century, and the community is concentrated in the West Midlands, west London and parts of Yorkshire. Sikh names sit well below the national top 100 in the ONS tables, for the straightforward reason that the community is a small share of all births. If you want to know how many children received a particular name last year, the full-list dataset is searchable and will answer it directly; a general baby-name site guessing at a rank for a Punjabi name is guessing.

One point of confusion is worth clearing up before you look. Singh and Kaur are not given names and should not be read as one when they appear in a name field. They follow the given name. Where a form has recorded one as a first name, that is almost always the form imposing a Western name order on a structure that does not have one.

Pronunciation

Punjabi is written in Gurmukhi in India and in Shahmukhi in Pakistan, and it is a tonal language — something almost no English-language name site mentions. Tone changes meaning, and no English respelling can carry it. We do not print pronunciation guides for Punjabi names for that reason. A speaker in the family, or the granthi at the gurdwara, will give you the sound in a few seconds and will get the tone right.