Bà
given name · Latin script
Meaning: grandmother; used as a respectful address for an older woman; Mrs (Vietnamese Personal Names (CIA Foreign Names Studies, ch. 37))
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 1 country · latest register: Familienaam.be, 2008
Bà is a given name used for both men and women, written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Spain than in any other country: 3,376 people, counted by INE.
- ESSpain1 in 15K(measured from records)
- CHSwitzerland1 in 50K
- BEBelgium1 in 51K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). 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.
- Spain (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 92 (measured from records)
- 1 in 15K (inferred from the name graph)
3,376 people
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Spain
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Ba in BR Brazil, ES Spain.
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)grandmother; used as a respectful address for an older woman; Mrs.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Vietnamese Personal Names (CIA Foreign Names Studies, ch. 37)
Attested across 27 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Bà is found
(measured from records)Bà 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES Spain | 3,376 | 1 in 15K | 3.4K | Ba | 7 |
| US United States | 2,451 | 1 in 136K | 3.2K | — | 92 |
| BR Brazil | 399 | 1 in 531K | 399 | Ba | 1 |
| BE Belgium | 231 | 1 in 51K | 1.1K | — | 6 |
| CH Switzerland | 169 | 1 in 50K | 169 | — | 8 |
| FI Finland | 62 | 1 in 90K | 108 | — | 3 |
3,376 people counted by INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos). 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: IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); Statbel — Noms de famille (family names); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)Bà is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Vietnamese, a grandmother
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In jpx-pro, place
as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)
In jpx-pro, wheel
as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)
In bnt-pro, fish: Characidae: Brycinus schoutedeni
as a wordBantu Lexical Reconstructions 3 (BLR3), Tervuren 2002/2003
In Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin reading of 坝
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Ordered by how much of this spelling's record each language holds, so a sense from a language the name is barely used in sits last rather than first.
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Zang Bab. 162CNLate 2nd/early 3rd century Chinese general
- Xiahou Bab. 1873rd century Chinese Cao Wei state general
- Sun Bab. 250Eastern Wu imperial prince (died 250)
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
Evidence
(measured from records)1 register or reference work attests this spelling, across 1 country.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Bà mean, and where does it come from?
- grandmother; used as a respectful address for an older woman; Mrs. Recorded by Vietnamese Personal Names (CIA Foreign Names Studies, ch. 37).
- Is Bà a male or female name?
- Bà is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Bà?
- In Spain, the national register counted about 3.4 thousand people named Bà, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled ba. After it come United States, Brazil, Belgium and Switzerland; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Bà most common?
- Bà is densest in Spain, where the national register counts about 1 in 15 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Bà?
- In Spain, the national register counted 3,376 people named Bà, about 1 in 15 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Bà?
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/b%C3%A0The 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, “Bà” — ranked 1527th in Spain (INE). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.