Mahdavi
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Muslim; from Arabic MadhdabT, a term denoting a follower of a particular school of Islamic law
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Mahdavi is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Afghanistan than in any other country.
- IRIran≈1 in 86K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 751K
- AFAfghanistan≈1 in 19K
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.
- Afghanistan (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 164 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 19K (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Afghanistan, 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(measured from records)
Muslim; from Arabic MadhdabT, a term denoting a follower of a particular school of Islamic law.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Mahdavi 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AF Afghanistan | ≈2,000 est. | ≈1 in 19K | — | Mahdavi | 10 |
| IR Iran | ≈990 est. | ≈1 in 86K | — | Mahdavi | 70 |
| US United States | 443 | 1 in 751K | 573 | Mahdavi | 164 |
| AO Angola | ≈390 est. | ≈1 in 84K | — | Mahdavi | 1 |
| DE Germany | ≈180 est. | ≈1 in 451K | — | Mahdavi | 48 |
| SE Sweden | 103 | 1 in 99K | 103 | Mahdavi | 15 |
| AT Austria | ≈84 est. | ≈1 in 105K | — | Mahdavi | 15 |
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; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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)
Mahdavi 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 English, An adherent of Mahdavia
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)
- Mohammad-Ali Mahdavib. 1922IRIranian entrepreneur
- Mohsen Mahdavib. 1925IRIranian actor (1925–2002)
- Justine Harun-Mahdavib. 1945DEGerman writer
- Ardeshir Mahdavib. 1956ATAustrian architect
- Nader Mahdavib. 1963IRIranian naval officer (1963-1987)
- Pardis Mahdavib. 1978USAmerican journalist and academic
- Paasha Mahdavib. 1984USresearcher ORCID ID = 0000-0003-3172-8478
- Sadegh Baradaran Mahdavib. 1991IRresearcher
- Iman Mahdavib. 1995IRIranian wrestler (born 1995)
- Sayed Mosayeb MahdaviIRIranian acarologist
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 18 sources across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 573 | #41,034 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 443 | #47,791 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 315 | #59,916 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 103 | #7,054 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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
- What does the name Mahdavi mean, and where does it come from?
- Muslim; from Arabic MadhdabT, a term denoting a follower of a particular school of Islamic law. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Mahdavi have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.0 thousand people named Mahdavi in Afghanistan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled mahdavi.
- How common is the name Mahdavi?
- In the United States, the national register counted 443 people named Mahdavi in 2010, about 1 in 751 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Mahdavi?
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/mahdaviThe 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, “Mahdavi”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.