Shongwe

surname · Latin script

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

Shongwe is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Africa than in any other country. In Eswatini it is the 4th most common surname.

rarermore common
  • ZASouth Africa≈1 in 1.3K(inferred from the name graph)
  • SZEswatini≈1 in 158
  • HUHungary≈1 in 338K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

South Africa (inferred from the name graph)

≈43,000 people, est.

Sources
76 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 158 (inferred from the name graph)

Eswatini, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin

No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Shongwe 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.

Where Shongwe is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
ZA South Africa#111≈43,000 est.≈1 in 1.3K—Shongwe76
SZ Eswatini#4≈7,000 est.≈1 in 158106Shongwe25
TZ Tanzania—≈96 est.≈1 in 608K—Shongwe5
KE Kenya—≈92 est.≈1 in 584K—Shongwe5
US United States—≈38 est.≈1 in 8.7MlistedShongwe61
HU Hungary—≈29 est.≈1 in 338K—Shongwe1
PL Poland—41 in 9.6M2——

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: the us-wru-surnames-voterfile register; Eswatini EBC 2023 Secondary Elections candidate ballots; dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames). 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)

Shongwe is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In ss, Founding Swazi clan said to originate from Zululand.

    as a wordsanames.co.za — South African surnames

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)

192019401960198020002020Dzeliwe of Eswatini, b. 1927Jeremiah Shongwe, b. 1948Abel Shongwe, b. 1966Myron Shongwe, b. 1981Sidumo Shongwe, b. 1981Lungile Shongwe, b. 1983Jabulani Shongwe, b. 1990Wendy Shongwe, b. 2003

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 5 sources across 4 countries.

Official registers attesting Shongwe
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
SZ EswatiniEswatini EBC 2023 Secondary Elections candidate ballots2023106#4
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)20262—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)20262—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—2#385,830
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—2#393,640
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.)———

Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.

Frequently asked questions

What are other forms of the name Shongwe?
In the etymology graph, Surname is a form of the same name in other languages.
In which country does Shongwe have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 43 thousand people named Shongwe in South Africa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled shongwe.
How common is the name Shongwe?
In Poland, the national register counted 4 people named Shongwe in 2026, about 1 in 9.6 million residents.
How common is Shongwe compared with other names?
In South Africa, Shongwe is the 111th most common surname of 285,788 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Shongwe?

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

The same 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), and bulk access is licensed separately.

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, “Shongwe” — the 111th most common surname in South Africa. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Shongwe parses inside a full name →