Alabi

surname · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/əɫɑbi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Alabi is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Nigeria it is the 38th most common surname. Recorded meaning: àlà (“white cloth of Ọbàtálá, purity”) + bí (“to give birth to”), "'One born of purity", "One born of the white cloth".

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 448K(measured from records)
  • NGNigeria≈1 in 11M
  • KNSt. Kitts & Nevis1 in 54K

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.

United States (measured from records)

742 people, 2010

Sources
255 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 54K (inferred from the name graph)

St. Kitts & Nevis

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

àlà (“white cloth of Ọbàtálá, purity”) + bí (“to give birth to”), "'One born of purity", "One born of the white cloth."

Sources 1

Where in the world(measured from records)

Alabi 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.

Where Alabi is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—7421 in 448K1.3KAlabi255
BR Brazil—1891 in 1.1M189—1
AR Argentina—671 in 679K67——
FI Finland—451 in 124K45—6
PL Poland—371 in 1M22—2
NG Nigeria#38≈20 est.≈1 in 11MlistedAlabi121
SE Sweden—171 in 600K17—7
GY Guyana—21 in 375K2—4
KN St. Kitts & Nevis—11 in 54K1——

742 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; St Kitts & Nevis — Register of Electors 2026. 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)

Alabi is also recorded as 6 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Swahili surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, United States, United Kingdom, South Africa

    Also written Àlabi

  • Arabic surname2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, United States, Syria, Kenya

    Also written Al-Abi

  • Indonesian surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia, United States

    Languages: Indonesian, Malay

    Also written Alåbi

  • Hebrew surname2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, United States, Kenya

    Also written אלעבי

  • Hindi surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Nigeria, India, United States, United Kingdom

    Languages: Hindi, Urdu

    Also written Alàbi

  • Portuguese surname2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Brazil, Nigeria, United States, United Kingdom

    Also written Alabí

52 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)

Alabi is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Yoruba, A unisex oríkì name, meaning "One born of purity, One born of the white cloth".

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

  • In Catalan, inflection of alabar:

    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)

19401960198020002020Joshua Alabi, b. 1958Tope Alabi, b. 1970Anthony Alabi, b. 1981Solomon Alabi, b. 1988Kemi Alabi, b. 1990James Alabi, b. 1994Zainab Damilola Alabi, b. 2002

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)

FormalDear Mr Alabi,
InformalHi Alabi,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 25 sources across 16 countries.

Official registers attesting Alabi
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020201.3K#20,515
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010742#31,251
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000410#48,380
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—189#38,448
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—67—
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)—45#24,754
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)202622—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—22#83,686
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—17#28,809
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)202615—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—15#104,502
GY GuyanaGuyana — Official List of Electors July 202520252#623

Reference works 4

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

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 Alabi mean, and where does it come from?
àlà (“white cloth of Ọbàtálá, purity”) + bí (“to give birth to”), "'One born of purity", "One born of the white cloth." Recorded by Wiktionary.
How do you pronounce Alabi?
A machine transcription gives /əɫɑbi/ (IPA) for English.
In which country does Alabi have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 742 people named Alabi, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled alabi.
Where is Alabi most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Alabi is densest in St. Kitts & Nevis — about 1 in 54 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Alabi?
In the United States, the national register counted 742 people named Alabi in 2010, about 1 in 448 thousand residents.
How common is Alabi compared with other names?
In Nigeria, Alabi is the 38th most common surname of 346,007 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Alabi?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

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

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, “Alabi” — the 38th most common surname in Nigeria. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Alabi parses inside a full name →