Banu
surname · Latin script
Meaning: princess, lady, Mrs
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/bɑːnʉː/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Banu is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Pakistan than in any other country, where it is the 67th most common surname.
- BDBangladesh≈1 in 8.3K(inferred from the name graph)
- IDIndonesia≈1 in 36K
- ECEcuador1 in 3.4Kas Baño
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Banu itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Pakistan (inferred from the name graph)
- #387 (measured from records)
- 4 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 154 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.7K (inferred from the name graph)
≈46,000 named Bano, est.
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Romania, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Bano in PK Pakistan and Baño in EC Ecuador.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
princess, lady, Mrs
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of Muslim Names
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Banu 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PK Pakistan | #67 | ≈46,000 est. | ≈1 in 5K | 2 | Bano | 69 |
| BD Bangladesh | #76 | ≈20,000 est. | ≈1 in 8.3K | — | Banu | 48 |
| RO Romania | #700 | ≈7,900 est. | ≈1 in 2.7K | — | Banu | 29 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈7,400 est. | ≈1 in 36K | listed | Banu | 87 |
| EC Ecuador | #755 | 4,902as Baño | 1 in 3.4K | 4.9K | Baño | 20 |
| HR Croatia | — | 2,779as Ban | 1 in 1.5K | 2.8K | — | 3 |
| SI Slovenia | — | 598as Ban | 1 in 3.5K | 598 | — | 1 |
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: Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) — Form-33 List of Contesting Candidates, 2018 General Election; INEC — civil registry names; DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form); stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank). 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)
Banu 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.
woman, ray of light
as a nameMuslim baby names (our 2,000 meaningful and beautiful names for boys and girls) English-Urdu with Roman
In trk-pro, wild cat
as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)
In Basque, First-person singular (nik), taking third-person singular (hura) as direct object, conditional indicative form of izan.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Esperanto, imperative of bani
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In kvh, water; tears
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
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)
- Constantin Banub. 1873RORomanian writer, journalist and politician
- Gheorghe Banub. 1889RORomanian eugenicist and politician
- Cecilia Banub. 1911UASoviet writer (1911-1998)
- Ion Banub. 1913RORomanian philosopher
- Naseem Banub. 1916INHindi film actress
- Georges Banub. 1943ROFrench writer
- Saira Banub. 1944INIndian film actress
- Gulzar Banub. 1963INMayor of Mangalore City Corporation
- Grace Banub. 2000INDalit activist and first transgender woman to attend computer science university program in Tamil Nadu
- Hamida BanuINIndia’s first woman wrestler
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 57 sources across 29 countries.
Reference works 5
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Тахиров, Речник на турските лични имена в България
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 Banu?
- A machine transcription gives /bɑːnʉː/ (IPA) for Hindi.
- What does the name Banu mean, and where does it come from?
- princess, lady, Mrs Recorded by A Dictionary of Muslim Names.
- In which country does Banu have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 46 thousand people named Bano in Pakistan, more than in any other country we hold.
- How common is the name Banu?
- In Ecuador, the national register counted 4,902 people named Baño in 2024, about 1 in 3.4 thousand residents.
- How common is Banu compared with other names?
- In Pakistan, Banu is the 67th most common surname of 51,489 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Banu?
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/banuThe 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, “Banu” — the 67th most common surname in Pakistan. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.