Thembisa
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Thembisa is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Africa than in any other country.
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 3.8K(inferred from the name graph)
- GYGuyana1 in 375K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 10M
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)
- Sources
- 31 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 3.8K (inferred from the name graph)
≈15,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
South Africa, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Attested across 6 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Thembisa 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZA South Africa | #749 | ≈15,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.8K | — | Thembisa | 31 |
| US United States | — | ≈11 est. | ≈1 in 31M | — | Thembisa | 27 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈6 est. | ≈1 in 10M | — | Thembisa | 11 |
| GY Guyana | — | 2 | 1 in 375K | 2 | — | 1 |
| DE Germany | — | — | — | — | Thembisa | 5 |
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: Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)
Thembisa is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Zulu, to cause to hope
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Xhosa, to promise
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 2 sources across 2 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 2 | #592 |
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Thembisa a male or female name?
- Thembisa 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 Thembisa have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 15 thousand people named Thembisa in South Africa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled thembisa.
- How common is the name Thembisa?
- In Guyana, the national register counted 2 people named Thembisa in 2025, about 1 in 375 thousand residents.
- How common is Thembisa compared with other names?
- In South Africa, Thembisa is the 749th most common given name of 189,620 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Thembisa?
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/thembisaThe 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, “Thembisa” — the 749th most common given name in South Africa. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.