Fanou
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/fanu/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Fanou is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Benin than in any other country.
- BJBenin≈1 in 6.6K(inferred from the name graph)
- TGTogo≈1 in 29K
- CMCameroon≈1 in 200K
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.
- Benin (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 82 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 6.6K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,900 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Benin, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Fanou 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.
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: Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); Journal Officiel — Liste definitive des candidats (legislatives 2024). 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)
Fanou 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 Galician, third-person singular preterite indicative of fanar
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)
- Arcadius Fanoub. 1972BJBeninese sprinter
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 5 sources across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 6 | #92,580 |
| TG Togo | Journal Officiel — Liste definitive des candidats (legislatives 2024) | 2024 | 1 | #12 |
Reference works 1
- 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
- How do you pronounce Fanou?
- A machine transcription gives /fanu/ (IPA) for French.
- In which country does Fanou have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.9 thousand people named Fanou in Benin, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled fanou.
- How common is the name Fanou?
- In Belgium, the national register counted 6 people named Fanou in 2008, about 1 in 2.0 million residents.
- How common is Fanou compared with other names?
- In Benin, Fanou is the 161st most common surname of 5,339 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Fanou?
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/fanouThe 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, “Fanou” — the 161st most common surname in Benin. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.