Namu

given name · Latin script

Meaning: Witness; martyr

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Namu is a given name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in India.

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

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)

Witness; martyr.

Sources 1

  • The African book of names

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Namu counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Where Namu is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spelling
IN India—105—
KN St. Kitts & Nevis—1—
BE Belgium—1—
NG Nigeria—listed—

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: Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; St Kitts & Nevis — Register of Electors 2026; Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population 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).

Other names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Namu is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Japanese given name3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Japan, India

    Also written Namư, Nämu

  • Korean given name7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in South Korea, United States, Canada

    Also written 남우, 나무, Namwoo, Nam-Woo, Nam-U

40 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Namu 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.

  • In men, v. and adj., to slip in walking, to slide ; to speak fluently; slip

    as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language

  • In fud, mosquito

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In fj, mosquito (small flying insect of the family Culicidae, known for biting and sucking blood)

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In kwd, small flying insect (generic); sandfly, gnat

    as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0

  • In English, A sandfly of the genus Austrosimulium.

    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.

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 9 sources across 5 countries.

Official registers attesting Namu
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls—210#13,654
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls—105#27,482
BE BelgiumFamilienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register)20081#168,798

Reference works 2

  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • Wikipedia surname tokens

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 Namu mean, and where does it come from?
Witness; martyr. Recorded by The African book of names.
Is Namu a male or female name?
Namu is recorded for both men and women. We don't publish a percentage split: a record's gender belongs to the person and is attached to every given name on that record, so names in cultures where a name string also carries a parent's or spouse's given name pick up large cross-gender counts.
In which country does Namu have the most bearers?
Namu is most frequently recorded in India.

What do you want to know about Namu?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/namu

The 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, “Namu”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Namu parses inside a full name →