Tel
loc · Latin script
Meaning: Altered short form of Terry or bTerence, of recent origin
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Tel is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in Peru.
- PEPeru
- COColombia
- ILIsrael
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Peru (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 48 (measured from records)
no count published
Highest-authority source
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Altered short form of Terry or bTerence, of recent origin. For the substitution of -/ for -r, cf. Hal.
Sources 1
- A concise dictionary of first names
Attested across 5 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Tel counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PE Peru | — | — | Tel | 9 |
| IL Israel | — | — | Tel | 1 |
| BR Brazil | — | 4.7K | Tel | 48 |
| CO Colombia | — | — | Tel | 8 |
| MX Mexico | — | — | Tel | 18 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 948 | — | 8 |
| IN India | — | 293 | — | 4 |
| US United States | — | 222 | — | 31 |
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 — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex. 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)
Tel 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.
English: altered short form of TERRY or TERENCE , of recent origin. For the substitution of - l for - r , cf. HAL .
as a word
In trk-pro, decking, covering
as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)
In non, first-person singular present indicative of telja
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
ISO 639-2 & ISO 639-3 language code for Telugu.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Czech, second-person singular imperative of telit
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)
- Mathys Telb. 2005FRFrench association football player (born 2005)
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 26 sources across 12 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2022 | 4.7K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 4.6K | #2,883 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | 2020 | 3K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2020 | 1.6K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | 2010 | 1.4K | — |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 948 | #1,825 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 796 | #1,093 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Nomes (census name API) | — | 451 | #15,271 |
| BR Brazil | Brasil.IO genero-nomes (IBGE Censo 2010 mirror, CC-BY-SA) | — | 451 | #6,597 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 293 | #13,604 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 292 | #27,027 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2010 | 249 | — |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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
- Where does the name Tel come from?
- Altered short form of Terry or bTerence, of recent origin. For the substitution of -/ for -r, cf. Hal. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names.
- What does the name Tel mean?
- Recorded meaning: Altered short form of Terry or bTerence, of recent origin.
- In which country does Tel have the most bearers?
- Tel is most frequently recorded in Peru, where it is most often spelled tel.
What do you want to know about Tel?
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/telThe 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, “Tel”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.