Bāh
surname · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Bāh is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Guinea than in any other country, where it is the 4th most common surname. Recorded meaning: Early 19th century, probably borrowed from French bah.
- MLMali≈1 in 322(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 71K
- GNGuinea≈1 in 25
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.
- Guinea (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 278 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 25 (inferred from the name graph)
≈500,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Guinea, 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 Bah in US United States, ML Mali, SN Senegal and 2 more.
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)
Early 19th century, probably borrowed from French bah.
Sources 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Digital Pāḷi Dictionary
- Wiktionary
Attested across 18 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Bāh 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GN Guinea | #4 | ≈500,000 est. | ≈1 in 25 | 13 | Bah | 32 |
| ML Mali | #5 | ≈61,000 est. | ≈1 in 322 | 1 | Bah | 26 |
| SN Senegal | #74 | ≈47,000 est. | ≈1 in 334 | 6 | Bah | 37 |
| GM Gambia | #4 | ≈39,000 est. | ≈1 in 55 | 11 | Bah | 73 |
| CI Côte d’Ivoire | — | ≈37,000 est. | ≈1 in 748 | 7K | — | 28 |
| US United States | — | 4,690 | 1 in 71K | 7.6K | Bah | 278 |
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; nomprenoms.ci — ranked Ivorian surname frequencies; Wikidata humans by citizenship — given & family names; DGE — candidate declarations, 41 party/coalition lists (legislatives anticipees 17 Nov 2024); DGE — Liste provisoire des candidatures communales Conakry 2026; IEC — Nominated Candidates National Assembly Elections 2022. 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)
Bāh 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 wym, brook, stream
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)
No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Bāh mean, and where does it come from?
- Early 19th century, probably borrowed from French bah. Recorded by The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and Digital Pāḷi Dictionary and 1 other source.
- In which country does Bāh have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 504 thousand people named Bāh in Guinea, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bah.
- How common is the name Bāh?
- In the United States, the national register counted 4,690 people named Bāh in 2010, about 1 in 71 thousand residents.
- How common is Bāh compared with other names?
- In Guinea, Bāh is the 4th most common surname of 427 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Bāh?
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/b%C4%81hThe 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, “Bāh” — the 4th most common surname in Guinea. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.