Mäĺ
surname · Latin script
Mäĺ is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Borrowed from French mal (“illness”). Doublet of malus.
- INIndia1 in 6.1K(measured from records)
- SISlovenia1 in 37K
- GYGuyana1 in 75K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Mäĺ itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- India (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 25 (measured from records)
- 1 in 6.1K (inferred from the name graph)
218,731 people
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
India
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Mal in US United States and 말 in KR South Korea.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Borrowed from French mal (“illness”). Doublet of malus.
Cited for this meaning 8
- Digital Pāḷi Dictionary
- Lietuvių pavardžių žodynas (Dictionary of Lithuanian Surnames)
- A Frequency Dictionary of German
- A Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese
- Wiktionary
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Mäĺ counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | — | 218,731 | 1 in 6.1K | 219K | — | 2 |
| US United States | — | 291 | 1 in 1.1M | 1.2K | Mal | 20 |
| BE Belgium | — | 150 | 1 in 78K | 150 | — | — |
| BR Brazil | — | 102 | 1 in 2.1M | 102 | — | — |
| KR South Korea | #962 | ≈96 est. | ≈1 in 539K | — | 말 | 25 |
| SI Slovenia | — | 57 | 1 in 37K | 57 | — | — |
| GY Guyana | — | 10 | 1 in 75K | 10 | — | — |
218,731 people counted by Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Mäĺ mean, and where does it come from?
- Borrowed from French mal (“illness”). Doublet of malus. Recorded by Digital Pāḷi Dictionary and Lietuvių pavardžių žodynas (Dictionary of Lithuanian Surnames) and 6 other sources.
- In which country does Mäĺ have the most bearers?
- In India, the national register counted about 219 thousand people named Mäĺ, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Mäĺ most common?
- Mäĺ is densest in India, where the national register counts about 1 in 6.1 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Mäĺ?
- In India, the national register counted 218,731 people named Mäĺ, about 1 in 6.1 thousand residents.
- How common is Mäĺ compared with other names?
- In South Korea, Mäĺ is the 962nd most common surname of 14,133 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Mäĺ?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/m%C3%A4%C4%BAThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Mäĺ” — the 962nd most common surname in South Korea. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.