Kwena
given name · Latin script
Meaning: Crocodile
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Kwena is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Africa than in any other country.
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 4K(inferred from the name graph)
- KEKenya≈1 in 142K
- NGNigeria≈1 in 16M
carrying the name, as Mondonomo estimates it from our sources: no national register counts it in these countries. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- South Africa (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 44 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 4.0K (inferred from the name graph)
≈14,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
South Africa, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Crocodile.
Sources 1
- The African book of names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kwena 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZA South Africa | #597 | ≈14,000 est. | ≈1 in 4K | — | Kwena | 44 |
| KE Kenya | — | ≈380 est. | ≈1 in 142K | — | Kwena | 25 |
| NG Nigeria | — | ≈14 est. | ≈1 in 16M | listed | — | 4 |
| US United States | — | ≈5 est. | ≈1 in 69M | — | Kwena | 16 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈3 est. | ≈1 in 22M | — | Kwena | 6 |
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.
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)
Kwena is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Tswana, Means 'crocodile'; the Bakwena totem.
as a wordsanames.co.za — South African surnames
In umb, choke
as a wordVocabulary of the Umbundu Language
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
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Kwena mean, and where does it come from?
- Crocodile. Recorded by The African book of names.
- Is Kwena a male or female name?
- Kwena is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
- In which country does Kwena have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 14 thousand people named Kwena in South Africa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kwena.
- How common is the name Kwena?
- Mondonomo estimates about 14,000 people in South Africa have Kwena as their first given name, about 1 in 4.0 thousand residents. No national register counts it there; the figure is ours, calibrated against the registers that do.
- How common is Kwena compared with other names?
- In South Africa, Kwena is the 597th most common given name of 189,620 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kwena?
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/kwenaThe 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, “Kwena” — the 597th most common given name in South Africa. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.