Brave
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Strong in the face of fear; courageous
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/bɹeɪv/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Brave is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Nigeria than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 574K(measured from records)
- HTHaiti≈1 in 15K
- GAGabon≈1 in 108K
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.
- Nigeria (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 188 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 15K (inferred from the name graph)
≈760 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Haiti, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Strong in the face of fear; courageous.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Brave 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NG Nigeria | — | ≈760 est. | ≈1 in 282K | — | Brave | 20 |
| HT Haiti | — | ≈720 est. | ≈1 in 15K | listed | — | 1 |
| US United States | — | 580 | 1 in 574K | 714 | Brave | 188 |
| DZ Algeria | — | ≈230 est. | ≈1 in 191K | — | Brave | 5 |
| MA Morocco | — | ≈150 est. | ≈1 in 230K | — | Brave | 10 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 82 | 1 in 211K | 82 | Brave | 28 |
| LY Libya | — | ≈31 est. | ≈1 in 224K | — | Brave | 2 |
| GA Gabon | — | ≈21 est. | ≈1 in 108K | 1 | — | — |
| GD Grenada | #124 | — | — | — | Brave | 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: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); Ministere de l'Interieur — 2025 candidate lists (local + legislative); the ht-potomitan-names register. 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)
Brave 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 English, ndima bé, ndila ngama bengo, fila
as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language
In pi, first-person singular present/imperative middle of brūti (“to say”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Norwegian Bokmål, definite singular/plural of brav
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Italian, feminine plural of bravo
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Esperanto, bravely, valiantly
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)
- Ulf the Braveb. 750NONorwegian hersir
- Franklin P. Braveb. 1932USOsage-Cherokee artist
- LaDonna Brave Bull Allardb. 1956USLakota historian and activist
- Iwan Braveb. 1963SRSurinamese journalist
- Lisa Braveactress
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 28 sources across 16 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 714 | #34,217 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 602 | #35,387 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 580 | #38,214 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 82 | #22,138 |
| HT Haiti | Potomitan — Noms et prénoms haïtiens (Haitian name lexicon) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Brave mean, and where does it come from?
- Strong in the face of fear; courageous. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- What are other forms of the name Brave?
- In the etymology graph, Bravo is a form of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Brave?
- A machine transcription gives /bɹeɪv/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Brave have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 759 people named Brave in Nigeria, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled brave.
- How common is the name Brave?
- In the United States, the national register counted 580 people named Brave in 2010, about 1 in 574 thousand residents.
- How common is Brave compared with other names?
- In Grenada, Brave is the 124th most common surname of 3,427 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Brave?
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/braveThe 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, “Brave” — the 124th most common surname in Grenada. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.