Sinai (surname) explained

Sinai is a surname. It is a Portuguese-style spelling of the Konkani surname Shenoy or Shenai. This spelling originated from Goa on the West Coast of India.^[1] It is also an Arabic and Hebrew surname and masculine given name derived from Mount Sinai.^[2] In the United States, the 2010 Census found 367 people with the surname Sinai, making it the 55,841st-most-common name in the country. This represented an increase from 277 people (66,676th-most common) in the 2000 Census. In both censuses, about eight-tenths of the bearers of this surname identified as white, one-tenth as Hispanic, and three percent as Asian.^[3] The Sinai families in India belong to the Brahmin caste.

People

Notable people with this surname include:

• Narana Sinai Coissoró (born 1933), Portuguese politician of Goan origin
• Yakov Sinai (born 1935), Russian mathematician
• Khosrow Sinai (1941–2020), Iranian film director
• Allen Sinai, American economist
• Moshe Sinai (born 1961), Israeli footballer
• Avraham Sinai (born Ibrahim Yassin, 1962), Lebanese-born Hezbollah member who converted to Judaism
• Nick Sinai (born 1970s), American government official and venture capitalist

Fictional characters

Fictional characters with this surname include:

• Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel Midnight's Children

Notes and References

1. Book: Saradesāya, Manohararāya . A History of Konkani Literature from 1500 to 1992 . Pune . Sahitya Akademi . 24 . 2000 . 14 August 2019 . 8172016646.
2. Book: Hanks, Patrick . Dictionary of American Family Names . 2 . 354 . Oxford University Press . United States . 8 May 2003 . 14 August 2019 . 0195081374.
3. Web site: How common is your last name? . Newsday . 5 September 2018.