Malave
surname · Latin script
Meaning: M(e)lave, Yid. name of the town of Mlawa in Poland
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/malabe/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Malave is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Venezuela than in any other country.
- VEVenezuela≈1 in 1K(inferred from the name graph)
- ECEcuador1 in 2.3K
- USUnited States1 in 63K
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.
- Venezuela (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 242 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.0K (inferred from the name graph)
≈28,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Venezuela, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
M(e)lave, Yid. name of the town of Mlawa in Poland. Vars.: Mlawer, Melaver; Malavski, Malavsky, Malawsky. Malcolm Scots: from the Gael, personal name MaelColum ‘devotee of (St) Columba’ (see Colomb). Var.: Malcom. Patrs.: Malco(l)mson (chiefly N Ireland).
Sources 1
- A dictionary of surnames
Where in the world(measured from records)
Malave 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VE Venezuela | #191 | ≈28,000 est. | ≈1 in 1K | — | Malave | 67 |
| EC Ecuador | #515 | 7,327 | 1 in 2.3K | 7.3K | Malave | 27 |
| US United States | — | 5,278 | 1 in 63K | 5.5K | Malave | 242 |
| CU Cuba | #176 | ≈2,500 est. | ≈1 in 4.4K | — | Malave | 5 |
| PR Puerto Rico | #111 | ≈2,300 est. | ≈1 in 1.4K | — | Malave | 45 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 127 | 1 in 27K | 127 | Malave | 11 |
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; INEC — civil registry names; INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public). 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)
Malave 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 Spanish, probably a shortened form of Basque Zumalabe, Zumalave, a topographic name composed of the elements zume ‘pasture’ -l- labe ‘oven’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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)
- Edwin Malaveb. 1950USPuerto Rican boxer
- Omar Malavéb. 1963VEVenezuelan baseball coach (1963–2021)
- Adrián Espinoza Malaveb. 1997VEVenezuelan basketball player (born 1997)
- Gaby Malaveb. 2001ECEcuadorian association football player
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 19 sources across 11 countries.
Reference works 2
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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
- Where does the name Malave come from?
- M(e)lave, Yid. name of the town of Mlawa in Poland. Vars.: Mlawer, Melaver; Malavski, Malavsky, Malawsky. Malcolm Scots: from the Gael, personal name MaelColum ‘devotee of (St) Columba’ (see Colomb). Recorded by A dictionary of surnames.
- How do you pronounce Malave?
- A machine transcription gives /malabe/ (IPA) for Spanish.
- What does the name Malave mean?
- Recorded meaning: M(e)lave, Yid. name of the town of Mlawa in Poland.
- In which country does Malave have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 28 thousand people named Malave in Venezuela, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled malave.
- How common is the name Malave?
- In Ecuador, the national register counted 7,327 people named Malave in 2024, about 1 in 2.3 thousand residents.
- How common is Malave compared with other names?
- In Venezuela, Malave is the 191st most common surname of 83,461 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Malave?
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/malaveThe 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, “Malave” — the 191st most common surname in Venezuela. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.