Moté
surname · Latin script
Moté is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From Middle English mot, from Old English mot (“grain of sand; mote; atom”), but of uncertain ultimate origin. Sometimes linked to Spanish mota (“speck”) and English mud.
- USUnited States1 in 77K(measured from records)
- BRBrazil1 in 281K
- DKDenmark1 in 978K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. 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.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 291 (measured from records)
- 1 in 77K (inferred from the name graph)
4,313 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Mote in US United States, IN India, LR Liberia and 1 more.
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)- Middle Englishmot(measured from records)
- Old Englishmot“grain of sand; mote; atom”(measured from records)
From Middle English mot, from Old English mot (“grain of sand; mote; atom”), but of uncertain ultimate origin. Sometimes linked to Spanish mota (“speck”) and English mud. Compare West Frisian mot (“peat dust”), Dutch mot (“dust from turf; sawdust; grit”), Norwegian mutt (“speck; mote; splinter; chip”).
Cited for this meaning 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wiktionary
Attested across 21 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Moté 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 4,313 | 1 in 77K | 4.3K | Mote | 291 |
| IN India | — | 1,593 | 1 in 832K | 1.6K | Mote | 49 |
| BR Brazil | — | 754 | 1 in 281K | 754 | — | 3 |
| ES Spain | — | 8 | 1 in 6.3M | 8 | — | 4 |
| DK Denmark | — | 6 | 1 in 978K | 6 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | — | 4 | 1 in 2.1M | 4 | Mote | 3 |
| LR Liberia | #252 | — | — | — | Mote | 1 |
4,313 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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 Moté mean, and where does it come from?
- From Middle English mot, from Old English mot (“grain of sand; mote; atom”), but of uncertain ultimate origin. Sometimes linked to Spanish mota (“speck”) and English mud. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names and The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and 1 other source.
- In which country does Moté have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 4.3 thousand people named Moté, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled mote.
- Where is Moté most common?
- Moté is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 77 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Moté?
- In the United States, the national register counted 4,313 people named Moté in 2010, about 1 in 77 thousand residents.
- How common is Moté compared with other names?
- In Liberia, Moté is the 252nd most common surname of 10,200 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Moté?
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/mot%C3%A9The 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, “Moté” — the 252nd most common surname in Liberia. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.