Tete
surname · Latin script
Meaning: First son
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Tete is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Tanzania than in any other country.
- INIndia1 in 463K(measured from records)
- TGTogo≈1 in 3.1K
- TZTanzania≈1 in 15K
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.
- Tanzania (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 67 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 3.1K (inferred from the name graph)
≈4,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Togo, 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)
First son.
Sources 1
- The African book of names
Attested across 6 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Tete 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.
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; nomprenoms.ci — ranked Ivorian surname frequencies; INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000); Journal Officiel — Liste definitive des candidats (legislatives 2024). 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)
Tete 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 dag, 1. a gambling game; a kind of dicing game played with cowries 2. to tete, to gamble; to play the game of ‘tete’
as a wordDagbani Dictionary CD
In men, v.,to hatch, as eggs ; to crack with light strokes, as nuts
as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language
In Latin, emphatic form of tē (“you”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In pam, bridge
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In nlg, a row, rank, line; to cross a stream on a log or bridge; to descend a ladder not using hands; a bridge
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)
- Charles Teteb. 1946FRFrench politician
- Kusum Teteb. 1973INpolitician from Odisha, India
- Zolani Teteb. 1988ZASouth African boxer
- Nicolás Tetéb. 1989ARArgentine director, writer, producer and screenwriter
- Kenny Teteb. 1995NLDutch association football player
- Salima Teteb. 2001INIndian field hockey 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)
Attested in 35 sources across 22 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 7.1K | #336 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 2.9K | #2,384 |
| CI Côte d’Ivoire | nomprenoms.ci — ranked Ivorian surname frequencies | — | 392 | #1,219 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1961 | 161 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1941 | 160 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1951 | 159 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1921 | 153 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1981 | 146 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1901 | 143 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1991 | 140 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1931 | 137 | — |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1971 | 131 | — |
Reference works 4
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
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 Tete mean, and where does it come from?
- First son. Recorded by The African book of names.
- In which country does Tete have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 4.0 thousand people named Tete in Tanzania, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled tete.
- How common is the name Tete?
- In India, the national register counted 2,863 people named Tete, about 1 in 463 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Tete?
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/teteThe 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, “Tete”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.