Mwai
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Good fortune
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/mwɑi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Mwai is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Switzerland than in any other country.
- CHSwitzerland1 in 1.7M(measured from records)
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.
- Switzerland (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 6 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.7M (inferred from the name graph)
5 people, 2024
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Switzerland
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)
Good fortune
Sources 1
- The book of African names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Mwai 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CH Switzerland | 5 | 1 in 1.7M | 5 | — | — |
| KE Kenya | — | — | — | Mwai | 6 |
| GY Guyana | — | — | 1 | — | — |
| US United States | — | — | listed | — | 2 |
| NG Nigeria | — | — | listed | — | — |
5 people counted by BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames), 2024. 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: BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; the us-wru-surnames-voterfile register. 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).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Jane Mwaib. 1970volleyball 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 8 sources across 5 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 5 | #101,952 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Mwai mean, and where does it come from?
- Good fortune Recorded by The book of African names.
- How do you pronounce Mwai?
- A machine transcription gives /mwɑi/ (IPA) for Swahili.
- In which country does Mwai have the most bearers?
- In Switzerland, the national register counted about 5 people named Mwai, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Mwai most common?
- Mwai is densest in Switzerland, where the national register counts about 1 in 1.7 million people carrying it.
- How common is the name Mwai?
- In Switzerland, the national register counted 5 people named Mwai in 2024, about 1 in 1.7 million residents.
What do you want to know about Mwai?
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/mwaiThe 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, “Mwai”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.