Begum
surname · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Begum is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Bangladesh than in any other country, where it is the most common surname. Recorded meaning: from a Muslim title of honour for a married or widowed woman, ultimately from East Turkic begum 'my mistress'.
- BDBangladesh≈1 in 278(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 6K
- PKPakistan≈1 in 7.5K
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 Begum 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.
- Bangladesh (inferred from the name graph)
- #181 (measured from records)
- 4 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 260 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 278 (inferred from the name graph)
≈580,000 people, est.
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Bangladesh, 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 Begam in IN India.
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)
from a Muslim title of honour for a married or widowed woman, ultimately from East Turkic begum 'my mistress'
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 18 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Begum 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BD Bangladesh | #1 | ≈580,000 est. | ≈1 in 278 | 3K | Begum | 129 |
| PK Pakistan | #17 | ≈31,000 est. | ≈1 in 7.5K | 5 | Begum | 74 |
| US United States | — | 12,255 | 1 in 27K | 20K | Begum | 260 |
| GB United Kingdom | #587 | ≈11,000 est. | ≈1 in 6K | — | Begum | 189 |
| IN India | #32 | 7,393as Begam | 1 in 179K | 7.4K | Begam | 175 |
| AE United Arab Emirates | #311 | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 6.2K | — | Begum | 55 |
| NO Norway | — | 1,300 | 1 in 4.2K | 1.3K | Begum | 20 |
| BH Bahrain | #156 | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 6.8K | — | Begum | 9 |
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: Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; This page provides data on the frequency and ranking of names in Bangladesh, published by the Bangladesh Bureau of Stati; Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) — Form-33 List of Contesting Candidates, 2018 General Election; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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)
Begum is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, To daub or cover with gum.
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)
- Halima Begumb. 1460TRMother of Ismail I
- Fatma Begumb. 1892INIndian actress and director
- Humaira Begumb. 1918AFQueen consort of Afghanistan (1918-2002)
- Nurjahan Begumb. 1925BDjournalist
- Tamanna Begumb. 1944PKPakistani actress
- Anwara Begumb. 1948BDBangladeshi flim actress
- Rehana Begumb. 1952INIndian artisan
- Doly Begumb. 1989BDCanadian politician
- Shamima Begumb. 1999GBBritish born teenager who left the UK to join ISIL and later attempted to come back
- Jana Begum17th century Mughal Indian noblewoman and scholar
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 51 sources across 24 countries.
Reference works 7
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
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 Begum mean, and where does it come from?
- from a Muslim title of honour for a married or widowed woman, ultimately from East Turkic begum 'my mistress' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Begum have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 584 thousand people named Begum in Bangladesh, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled begum.
- How common is the name Begum?
- In the United States, the national register counted 12,255 people named Begum in 2010, about 1 in 27 thousand residents.
- How common is Begum compared with other names?
- In Bangladesh, Begum is the most common surname of 12,312 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Begum?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/begumThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use; a free API key gives 1,000 requests a day, and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Begum” — the most common surname in Bangladesh. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.