Obu
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Acronym of On-Board Unit
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Obu is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Slovenia than in any other country.
- SISlovenia1 in 32K(measured from records)
- INIndia1 in 37M
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.
- Slovenia (measured from records)
- Sources
- 25 (measured from records)
- 1 in 32K (inferred from the name graph)
65 people
Highest-authority source
Slovenia
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Of in JP Japan.
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)
Acronym of On-Board Unit.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Obu 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SI Slovenia | 65 | 1 in 32K | 65 | — | 1 |
| IN India | 36 | 1 in 37M | 36 | — | 17 |
| JP Japan | — | — | — | Of | 25 |
| US United States | — | — | listed | Obu | 25 |
| NG Nigeria | — | — | — | Obu | 9 |
65 people counted by stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank). 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: stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank); the us-wru-surnames-voterfile register; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls. 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)
Obu 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 sc, alternative spelling of ovu (“egg”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Xhosa, this; class 14 proximal demonstrative.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In mog, extinguish a fire with water
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
In Basque, ‘circle’, ‘iron ring’
as a wordTrask, Etymological Dictionary of Basque (2008 posthumous draft)
In Latvian, Turku - pilsētas Somijā nosaukums zviedru valodā; arī Obū
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
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)
- Jaroslav Obub. 1985SIresearcher, ORCID id # 0000-0002-8172-2536
- Andrej ObuSIresearcher
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 9 sources across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 85 | #25,377 |
| SI Slovenia | stat.si Imena rojstva — full name register (per-token frequency + rank) | — | 65 | #6,302 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 36 | #55,151 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 1
- 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 Obu mean, and where does it come from?
- Acronym of On-Board Unit. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- What are other forms of the name Obu?
- In the etymology graph, Obi is a form of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Obu have the most bearers?
- In Slovenia, the national register counted about 65 people named Obu, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Obu most common?
- Obu is densest in Slovenia, where the national register counts about 1 in 32 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Obu?
- In Slovenia, the national register counted 65 people named Obu, about 1 in 32 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Obu?
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/obuThe 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, “Obu”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.