Alum
loc · Latin script
Meaning: An astringent salt, usually occurring in the form of pale crystals, much used in the dyeing and tanning trade and in certain medicines, and now understood to be a double sulphate of potassium and alum
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Alum is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- USUnited States
- GBUnited Kingdom
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.
- United States (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 51 (measured from records)
no count published
Highest-authority source
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
An astringent salt, usually occurring in the form of pale crystals, much used in the dyeing and tanning trade and in certain medicines, and now understood to be a double sulphate of potassium and aluminium (K₂SO₄·Al₂(SO₄)₃·24H₂O).
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 6 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Alum 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 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | listed | Alum | 51 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | — | Alum | 36 |
| ES Spain | — | 105 | — | 6 |
| AR Argentina | — | 58 | — | — |
| IN India | — | 15 | — | 7 |
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 us-wru-surnames-voterfile register; INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls. 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)
Alum 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 tsg, a bruise (black and blue spot on the body)
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
In Latvian, dative singular of alus
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In ang, dative plural of āl
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In tsg, bruise
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Latin, garlic
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.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 14 sources across 8 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 105 | #26,655 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 105 | #26,536 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 58 | — |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 15 | #94,280 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 11 | #8,855 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 8 | #108,864 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 5 | #27,490 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 5 | #200,558 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 3 | #8,749 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 1
- Wikipedia surname tokens
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 Alum mean, and where does it come from?
- An astringent salt, usually occurring in the form of pale crystals, much used in the dyeing and tanning trade and in certain medicines, and now understood to be a double sulphate of potassium and alum… Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- In which country does Alum have the most bearers?
- Alum is most frequently recorded in the United States, where it is most often spelled alum.
What do you want to know about Alum?
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/alumThe 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, “Alum”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.