Palu
loc · Latin script
Meaning: hammer
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 18 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Palu is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country, where it is the 28th most common surname.
- UYUruguay1 in 375as Paz(measured from records)
- ARArgentina1 in 526as Paz
- HUHungary≈1 in 960as Pál
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Palu itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- India (measured from records)
- #170 (measured from records)
- 8 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 309 (measured from records)
- 1 in 375 (inferred from the name graph)
1,119,711 named Pal
of 19M surnames, spellings grouped
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Uruguay, as Paz
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Pal in IN India, AR Argentina, BD Bangladesh, Pa in US United States, BR Brazil and Pál in HU Hungary.
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)hammer
Cited for this meaning 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Palu 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | #28 | 1,119,711as Pal | 1 in 1.2K | 1.1M | Pal | 309 |
| BR Brazil | — | 206,498as Paz | 1 in 1K | 206K | Pa | 46 |
| AR Argentina | — | 86,405as Paz | 1 in 526 | 86K | Pal | 48 |
| BD Bangladesh | #147 | ≈44,000 est. | ≈1 in 4K | — | Pal | 63 |
| US United States | — | 25,574as Paz | 1 in 13K | 27K | Pa | 293 |
| HU Hungary | — | ≈9,900 est. | ≈1 in 964 | 27K | Pál | 79 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 9,033as Paz | 1 in 375 | 9K | — | 5 |
1,119,711 people counted by Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls. 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; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Nyilvántartó — Top-100 given names in population (2020–2025); 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)Palu 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 Indonesian, hammer (tool)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Italian, forma reduzida ou apocopada de Paludo; também pode indicar habitante de uma localidade chamada Palù
as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
In tuw-pro, a k. of fish (similar to bream)
as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)
In xbr, to hit
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In zlm, hitting hard with a rigid weapon (of clubbing or hammering or drumming or striking off a printed copy; not of blows with a switch)
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
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)- Arseni Palub. 1912EEEstonian military personnel (1912-1997)
- Alfred-James Palub. 1926EEEstonian ice hockey player and coach (1926-2005)
- Uno Palub. 1933EEEstonian athletics competitor (1933–2024)
- Peeter Palub. 1942EEEstonian Soviet politician (1942-2008)
- Louie Palub. 1968CACanadian photographer (1968- )
- Tiit Palub. 1970EEEstonian actor, theatre director, translator, and dramatist (born 1970)
- Indrek Palub. 1977EEEstonian violinist, composer and music pedagogue (born 1977)
- Ivo Palub. 1979EEEstonian technologist (born 1979)
- Thomas Palub. 1986NZTongan rugby union player
- Boris Palub. 1996FRFrench rugby union 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).
Evidence
(measured from records)27 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 18 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 1K | #8,987 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 494 | #46,481 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 407 | #51,176 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 353 | #54,643 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 323 | #12,683 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 143 | — |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 92 | #24,096 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (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 Palu mean, and where does it come from?
- hammer Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- In which country does Palu have the most bearers?
- In India, the national register counted about 1.1 million people named Pal, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Palu most common?
- No national register we hold counts the spelling Palu itself. The densest figure for its family of spellings is Uruguay's: the national register counts about 1 in 375 people named Paz.
- How common is the name Palu?
- In India, the national register counted 1,119,711 people named Pal, about 1 in 1.2 thousand residents.
- How common is Palu compared with other names?
- In India, Palu is the 28th most common surname of 1,492,515 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Palu?
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/paluThe 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, “Palu” — the 28th most common surname in India. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.