Thal

loc · Latin script

Meaning: Toponymic surname from a landscape feature/place name: 'valley' (variant spelling of Dahl); bearer count 768

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Thal is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in Germany.

rarermore common
  • DEGermany
  • ATAustria
  • CHSwitzerland

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.

Germany (inferred from the name graph)

no count published

Sources
194 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Toponymic surname from a landscape feature/place name: 'valley' (variant spelling of Dahl); bearer count 768.

Sources 1

  • Deutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte

Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Thal counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Where Thal is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
DE Germany—1Thal89
CH Switzerland—4Thal6
AT Austria——Thal14
US United States—528Thal194
CA Canada——Thal26
NL Netherlands—36—5

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: the de-duesseldorf-vornamen register; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Thal is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish given name14 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Mexico, Switzerland

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Thäl, Thál, Thâl, Thål, Thàl

  • French name2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France

    Also written Thál

  • a separate name12 spellings in the group

    Also written Ťhäl, Țĥãl, Thäl, Tĥäl, Tĥâl

37 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Thal 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 German, Toponymic surname from a landscape feature: 'Tal' (valley); variant of the Dahl/Thal group.

    as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte

  • In German, Toponymic surname from a place name/landscape feature for a valley or hollow; bearers: 768.

    as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte

  • In German, Plate shows o/ö vowel variation in this surname type. Bearer count: 263.

    as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus

  • In German, Obsolete spelling of Tal which was deprecated in 1902 following the Second Orthographic Conference of 1901.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In German, Zu mhd. tal, mnd. dâl 'Tal, Niederung'; belegt die D/Th-Varianz im Anlaut. Typ mit 5 Types/3397 Tokens.

    as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 2: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen II, Konsonantismus

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)

1400160018002000Johann Thal, b. 1542Mango Hans, b. 1713Artur Thal, b. 1883Paula Thal, b. 1885Leon J. Thal, b. 1944Werner Thal, b. 1948Raiko Thal, b. 1963Eric Thal, b. 1965Reginald Thal, b. 1965Thal Abergel, b. 1982

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 22 sources across 12 countries.

Official registers attesting Thal
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020528#43,946
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010465#45,886
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000461#44,027
NL NetherlandsCBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007)200736#37,209
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)20244#118,617
DE GermanyStadt Düsseldorf Open Data — Vornamen Neugeborene20081—
DE GermanyDeutscher Familiennamenatlas Band 4———
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 3

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 Thal mean, and where does it come from?
Toponymic surname from a landscape feature/place name: 'valley' (variant spelling of Dahl); bearer count 768. Recorded by Deutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte.
In which country does Thal have the most bearers?
Thal is most frequently recorded in Germany, where it is most often spelled thal.

What do you want to know about Thal?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/thal

The 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, “Thal”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Thal parses inside a full name →