Tawa
given name · Latin script
Meaning: A religious person
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/təwə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Tawa is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Nigeria than in any other country.
- NGNigeria≈1 in 2.3K(inferred from the name graph)
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 321K
- TZTanzania≈1 in 608K
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.
- Nigeria (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 113 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.3K (inferred from the name graph)
≈93,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Nigeria, est.
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)
A religious person.
Sources 1
- The African book of names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Tawa 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NG Nigeria | #375 | ≈93,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.3K | listed | Tawa | 36 |
| BR Brazil | — | 149 | 1 in 1.4M | 149 | — | — |
| US United States | — | ≈110 est. | ≈1 in 3M | 198 | Tawa | 113 |
| TZ Tanzania | — | ≈96 est. | ≈1 in 608K | — | Tawa | 9 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈75 est. | ≈1 in 754K | — | Tawa | 8 |
| KE Kenya | — | ≈57 est. | ≈1 in 936K | — | Tawa | 15 |
| NZ New Zealand | — | ≈15 est. | ≈1 in 321K | — | Tawa | 25 |
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 2020; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror). 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)
Tawa 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, tobacco. Tawa- vuka, tobacco ground = snuff
as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language
In pmf, a large, tall tree: Dysoxylum acutangulum; the wood is too heavy for boats, and is not in great demand for house construction
as a wordAustronesian Comparative Dictionary (ACD), CLDF v2.0
In Malay, to laugh (show mirth by peculiar movement of the muscles of the face and emission of sounds)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In fj, un-, a-, dis-, il-, im-, in-, non- (functions similar to a negative English prefix)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In apb, an opening in the shore reef; used in names of landing places
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)
- Habib Tawab. 1945FRFrench journalist
- Kouam Tawab. 1974CMCameroonian writer, playwright, poet and theatre director
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)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 22 sources across 14 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 198 | #98,131 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 185 | #98,099 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 177 | #95,567 |
| 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 Tawa mean, and where does it come from?
- A religious person. Recorded by The African book of names.
- How do you pronounce Tawa?
- A machine transcription gives /təwə/ (IPA) for English.
- Is Tawa a male or female name?
- Tawa is a female name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- In which country does Tawa have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 93 thousand people named Tawa in Nigeria, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled tawa.
- How common is the name Tawa?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 149 people named Tawa in 2022, about 1 in 1.4 million residents.
- How common is Tawa compared with other names?
- In Nigeria, Tawa is the 375th most common given name of 138,191 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Tawa?
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/tawaThe 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, “Tawa” — the 375th most common given name in Nigeria. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.