Mabaso
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/məbæsoʊ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Mabaso is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Africa than in any other country, where it is the 44th most common surname.
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 780(inferred from the name graph)
- SZEswatini≈1 in 5.8K
- ZWZimbabwe≈1 in 9.8K
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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 69 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 780 (inferred from the name graph)
≈72,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
South Africa, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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
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)
Mabaso 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 | #44 | ≈72,000 est. | ≈1 in 780 | listed | Mabaso | 69 |
| MW Malawi | — | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 13K | — | Mabaso | 3 |
| ZW Zimbabwe | — | ≈1,500 est. | ≈1 in 9.8K | — | Mabaso | 5 |
| PH Philippines | — | ≈290 est. | ≈1 in 383K | — | Mabaso | 10 |
| SZ Eswatini | — | ≈190 est. | ≈1 in 5.8K | 4 | — | 4 |
| BW Botswana | — | ≈46 est. | ≈1 in 51K | listed | — | 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: Eswatini EBC 2023 Secondary Elections candidate ballots. 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)
Mabaso 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 Zulu, Zulu clan name with praise "Ndabezitha".
as a wordsanames.co.za — South African surnames
In Zulu, the fire-makers
as a nameKoopman, Adrian. Zulu Names (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2002)
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)
- Kopano Matlwab. 1985ZAnot in their usual nameSouth African writer
- Abel Mabasob. 1991ZASouth African footballer
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 6 sources across 5 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SZ Eswatini | Eswatini EBC 2023 Secondary Elections candidate ballots | 2023 | 4 | #47 |
Reference works 2
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Mabaso?
- A machine transcription gives /məbæsoʊ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Mabaso have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 72 thousand people named Mabaso in South Africa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled mabaso.
- How common is the name Mabaso?
- Mondonomo estimates about 72,000 people in South Africa have Mabaso as their first surname, about 1 in 780 residents. No national register counts it there; the figure is ours, calibrated against the registers that do.
- How common is Mabaso compared with other names?
- In South Africa, Mabaso is the 44th most common surname of 285,788 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Mabaso?
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/mabasoThe 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, “Mabaso” — the 44th most common surname in South Africa. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.