Mahmood
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: From the Arabic personal name Mahmud, literally 'praiseworthy'
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Mahmood is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Egypt than in any other country, where it is the 7th most common given name.
- BHBahrain≈1 in 353(inferred from the name graph)
- PKPakistan≈1 in 3.6K
- NLNetherlands1 in 254K
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 Mahmood itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Egypt (inferred from the name graph)
- 6 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 380 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 353 (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,100,000 named Mahmoud, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Bahrain, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Mahmoud in EG Egypt, SY Syria, KW Kuwait and 2 more and Mahmud in BD Bangladesh.
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)
From the Arabic personal name Mahmud, literally 'praiseworthy'.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.
How Mahmood is read(measured from records)
Mahmood is one spelling over 4 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English39%
From the Arabic personal name Mahmud, literally 'praiseworthy'.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Alternative spelling of Mahmud.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Arabic name meaning 'praised'.
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
- Urdu17%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Mahmood in Urdu.
- Arabic10%
praised; praiseworthy; an epithet of the Prophet Muhammad
as a nameA Dictionary of Muslim Names
praised; variant spelling of Mahmud
as a nameAfrican Muslim Names
- Malay5.6%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Mahmood in Malay.
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Mahmood 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EG Egypt | #7 | ≈1,100,000 est. | ≈1 in 92 | listed | Mahmoud | 254 |
| BD Bangladesh | #88 | ≈130,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.2K | listed | Mahmud | 159 |
| SY Syria | #25 | ≈100,000 est. | ≈1 in 186 | — | Mahmoud | 80 |
| JO Jordan | #19 | ≈66,000 est. | ≈1 in 164 | — | Mahmoud | 153 |
| PK Pakistan | — | ≈65,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.6K | — | Mahmood | 159 |
| KW Kuwait | #39 | ≈6,500 est. | ≈1 in 462 | — | Mahmoud | 101 |
| BH Bahrain | — | ≈4,300 est. | ≈1 in 353 | — | Mahmood | 96 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 68 | 1 in 254K | 281 | Mahmoud | 80 |
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: Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007). 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)
Mahmood is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
from a personal name based on Arabic mahmud, ‘praiseworthy’, ‘commendable’ (a derivative of hamida ‘to praise’; compare Muhammad). This is a popular name in all the countries of the Muslim world.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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)
- Karem Mahmoudb. 1922EGEgyptian actor and singer (1922–1995)
- Endon Mahmoodb. 1940MYFirst Lady of Malaysia
- Zia Mahmoodb. 1946USPakistani-American bridge player
- Jemilah Mahmoodb. 1959MYMalaysian doctor executive Director Sunway Centre for Planetary Health - Sunway University
- Khalid Mahmoodb. 1959NONorwegian politician
- Saba Mahmoodb. 1961USAmerican anthropologist, Professor, University of California, Berkeley
- Khalid Mahmoodb. 1961GBBritish politician (born 1961)
- Azhar Mahmoodb. 1975NZPakistani cricket coach and former cricketer
- Shabana Mahmoodb. 1980GBBritish politician (born 1980)
- Sohail MahmoodPKPakistani career diplomat
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)
Attested in 61 sources across 27 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 281 | #7,355 |
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018) | — | 63 | #5,813 |
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017) | — | 14 | #23,864 |
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018) | — | 5 | #34,383 |
Reference works 7
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Mahmood mean, and where does it come from?
- From the Arabic personal name Mahmud, literally 'praiseworthy'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Mahmood have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.1 million people named Mahmoud in Egypt, more than in any other country we hold.
- How common is the name Mahmood?
- In the Netherlands, the national register counted 68 people named Mahmood, about 1 in 254 thousand residents.
- How common is Mahmood compared with other names?
- In Egypt, Mahmood is the 7th most common given name of 107,792 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Mahmood?
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/mahmoodThe 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, “Mahmood” — the 7th most common given name in Egypt. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.