Matar
loc · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Matar is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Egypt than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Spanish and Portuguese habitational surname based on several places in the Iberian peninsula, ultimately from mata (“forest, woods”).
- EGEgypt≈1 in 13K(inferred from the name graph)
- SNSenegal≈1 in 5K
- SDSudan≈1 in 14K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Egypt (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 212 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 5.0K (inferred from the name graph)
≈7,800 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Senegal, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Mátar in US United States.
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)
Spanish and Portuguese habitational surname based on several places in the Iberian peninsula, ultimately from mata (“forest, woods”).
Sources 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Wiktionary
- Skok, Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (1971-74)
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Matar 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 | ≈7,800 est. | ≈1 in 13K | — | Matar | 86 |
| SD Sudan | ≈3,300 est. | ≈1 in 14K | — | Matar | 13 |
| SN Senegal | ≈3,100 est. | ≈1 in 5K | 24 | — | 10 |
| PK Pakistan | ≈950 est. | ≈1 in 246K | listed | — | 7 |
| US United States | 782 | 1 in 425K | 1.1K | Mátar | 212 |
| SE Sweden | 319 | 1 in 32K | 319 | — | 14 |
| VU Vanuatu | ≈10 est. | ≈1 in 29K | 1 | — | — |
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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DGE — candidate declarations, 41 party/coalition lists (legislatives anticipees 17 Nov 2024); Vanuatu Electoral Office — 2020 General Election consolidated candidate list; the pk-muslim-names-cc0 register. 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)
Matar is also recorded in 6 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Portuguese, to kill
as a wordA Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese
In Serbo-Croatian, alternative form of mȍtar (“sea fennel”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Faroese, second/third-person singular present of mata
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Swedish, present indicative of mata
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Portuguese, to kill (to cause to die)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In azc-pro, metate (grinding stone)
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)
- Abdul Mahdi Matarb. 1901IQIraqi faqih and poet
- Linda Matarb. 1925LBLebanese women's rights activist
- Muhammad Afifi Matarb. 1935EGpoet
- Ahmed Matarb. 1954IQIraqi poet
- Rania Matarb. 1964LBAmerican photographer
- Hisham Matarb. 1970USauthor, novelist, poet, essayist, architect, translator
- Ismail Matarb. 1983AEEmirati footballer
- Hadi Matarb. 1990USLebanese American man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie
- Nader Matarb. 1992LBLebanese footballer
- Ranine MatarLBLebanese actress
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 46 sources across 26 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.1K | #24,725 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 782 | #30,013 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 636 | #33,782 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 319 | #2,812 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 45 | #14,601 |
| SN Senegal | DGE — candidate declarations, 41 party/coalition lists (legislatives anticipees 17 Nov 2024) | 2024 | 24 | #47 |
| SE Sweden | SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023) | 2020 | 11 | — |
| VU Vanuatu | Vanuatu Electoral Office — 2020 General Election consolidated candidate list | 2020 | 1 | #7 |
| SE Sweden | SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023) | 2016 | — | — |
| PK Pakistan | Muslim given names (CC0) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- 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 Matar mean, and where does it come from?
- Spanish and Portuguese habitational surname based on several places in the Iberian peninsula, ultimately from mata (“forest, woods”). Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names and Wiktionary and 1 other source.
- In which country does Matar have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 7.8 thousand people named Matar in Egypt, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled matar.
- How common is the name Matar?
- In the United States, the national register counted 782 people named Matar in 2010, about 1 in 425 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Matar?
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/matarThe 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, “Matar”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.