Zele
surname · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈziɫ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Zele is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 2M(measured from records)
- CICôte d’Ivoire≈1 in 50K
- HRCroatia1 in 117K
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.
- India (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 102 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 50K (inferred from the name graph)
≈3,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Côte d’Ivoire, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Attested across 5 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Zele 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | ≈3,000 est. | ≈1 in 444K | — | Zele | 14 |
| CI Côte d’Ivoire | ≈540 est. | ≈1 in 50K | 191 | — | — |
| ZA South Africa | ≈400 est. | ≈1 in 142K | — | Zele | 9 |
| CD Congo - Kinshasa | ≈300 est. | ≈1 in 338K | — | Zele | 3 |
| US United States | 168 | 1 in 2M | 228 | Zele | 102 |
| AT Austria | ≈51 est. | ≈1 in 173K | — | Zele | 9 |
| HR Croatia | 36 | 1 in 117K | 36 | — | 1 |
| AL Albania | ≈26 est. | ≈1 in 119K | 48 | — | — |
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; nomprenoms.ci — ranked Ivorian surname frequencies; INSTAT Albania — Search the name (given-name counts); DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form). 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)
Zele is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In enm, Zeal; endless devotion or striving.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Latin, vocative singular of zēlus
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Portuguese, inflection of zelar:
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Latvian, Zellis
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
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)
- Jacques Zèleb. 1906FRFrench politician (1906-1994)
- József Tóth-Zeleb. 1936HUHungarian association football player and sports coach
- Gabor Zeleb. 1954HUHungarian association football player
- Mike Zeleb. 1956USAmerican football player
- Dorina Zeleb. 1992HUHungarian basketball player (born 1992)
- Lydia ZeleUSAmerican taekwondo practitioner
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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 18 sources across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 228 | #87,624 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 206 | #84,631 |
| CI Côte d’Ivoire | nomprenoms.ci — ranked Ivorian surname frequencies | — | 191 | #2,201 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 168 | #106,096 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Ethiopian name tokens (GitHub lehagere/ethiopian-names, 40/60 condominium list)
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
- How do you pronounce Zele?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈziɫ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Zele have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 3.0 thousand people named Zele in India, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled zele.
- How common is the name Zele?
- In the United States, the national register counted 168 people named Zele in 2010, about 1 in 2.0 million residents.
What do you want to know about Zele?
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/zeleThe 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, “Zele”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.