Mungo
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Scottish and northern English: of uncertain derivation
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ˈməŋɡoʊ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Mungo is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 241K(measured from records)
- GDGrenada1 in 8.1K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 145K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 171 (measured from records)
- 1 in 8.1K (inferred from the name graph)
1,382 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Grenada
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Scottish and northern English: of uncertain derivation. It is recorded as the byname of St Kentigern, the 6th-century apostle of south-west Scotland and north-west England. Having been glossed in Latin by his biographer as carissimus amicus ‘dearest friend’, the name (in its Brythonic form Munghu) came to represent later Welsh fy nghi ‘my dog’, i.e. ‘my pet’. Variant: Munga (Scottish Gaelic).
Sources 1
- A concise dictionary of first names
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Mungo 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 1,382 | 1 in 241K | 1.4K | Mungo | 171 |
| BR Brazil | 328 | 1 in 645K | 328 | — | — |
| AR Argentina | 68 | 1 in 669K | 68 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | 58 | 1 in 145K | 58 | Mungo | 3 |
| BE Belgium | 25 | 1 in 469K | 25 | — | 2 |
| GD Grenada | 14 | 1 in 8.1K | 14 | — | — |
1,382 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025. 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)
Mungo is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
from the personal name Mungo, of uncertain derivation. It was an alternative name for St. Kentigem, the patron saint of Glasgow, who was a 6thcentury apostle of southwestern Scotland and northwestern English.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, A material of short fiber and inferior quality obtained by deviling woollen rags or the remnants of woollen goods, specifically those of felted, milled, or hard-spun woollen cloth, as distinguished from shoddy, or the deviled product of loose-textured woollen goods or worsted.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Amistoso
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
Scottish: of uncertain derivation. It is recorded as the byname of St Kentigern, the 6th-century apostle of south-west Scotland and north-west England, and glossed in Latin by his biographer as carissimus amicus ‘dearest friend’, although it does not correspond to any Gaelic elements with this meaning. Variant: Munga (Gaelic) .
as a word
In Slovenian, mongoose (a small carnivore of the family Herpesidae)
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)
- John Mungo-Parkb. 1918GBBritish flying ace
- Ray Mungob. 1946USAmerican author
- Donatella Mungob. 1966ITItalian politician
- Petra Mungob. 1984CHSwiss association football player
- Domenico Mungob. 1993ITItalian association football player
- Julieta Mungob. 1997ARArgentine basketball player (born 1997)
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 26 sources across 14 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.4K | #19,538 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.3K | #18,994 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.2K | #22,666 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 328 | #24,538 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 68 | — |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 58 | #16,638 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 25 | #41,533 |
| GD Grenada | Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025 | 2025 | 14 | #209 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name 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
- Where does the name Mungo come from?
- Scottish and northern English: of uncertain derivation. It is recorded as the byname of St Kentigern, the 6th-century apostle of south-west Scotland and north-west England. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names.
- What are other forms of the name Mungo?
- In the etymology graph, Mongo is a form of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Mungo?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈməŋɡoʊ/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Mungo mean?
- Recorded meaning: Scottish and northern English: of uncertain derivation.
- In which country does Mungo have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 1.4 thousand people named Mungo, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled mungo.
- Where is Mungo most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Mungo is densest in Grenada — about 1 in 8.1 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Mungo?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,382 people named Mungo in 2010, about 1 in 241 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Mungo?
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/mungoThe 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, “Mungo”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.