Tumu
surname · Latin script
Meaning: We pray to God
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/tʃmu/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Tumu is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country.
- INIndia1 in 1.4M(measured from records)
- PGPapua New Guinea≈1 in 32K
- NGNigeria≈1 in 1.2M
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.
- India (measured from records)
- Sources
- 59 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 32K (inferred from the name graph)
951 people
Highest-authority source
Papua New Guinea, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
We pray to God.
Sources 1
- The African book of names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Tumu 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 | 951 | 1 in 1.4M | 951 | Tumu | 53 |
| PG Papua New Guinea | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 32K | 4 | — | — |
| NG Nigeria | ≈180 est. | ≈1 in 1.2M | listed | Tumu | 3 |
| US United States | ≈77 est. | ≈1 in 4.3M | listed | Tumu | 59 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈7 est. | ≈1 in 9.3M | — | Tumu | 10 |
951 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: Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; the us-wru-surnames-voterfile register; PNG Election Results Database — candidate names (1972–2022). 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)
Tumu 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 jpx-pro, big boat
as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)
In Hawaiian, Niʻihau form of kumu (“parent”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In tft, to dive (into water)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Māori, foundation, base
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In iba, early
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.
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Tumu Te Heuheub. 1941NZNgāti Tūwharetoa leader (1941–2025)
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)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 11 sources across 8 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 3.2K | #1,068 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 951 | #5,723 |
| PG Papua New Guinea | PNG Election Results Database — candidate names (1972–2022) | — | 4 | #32 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 4 | #10,696 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (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 Tumu mean, and where does it come from?
- We pray to God. Recorded by The African book of names.
- How do you pronounce Tumu?
- A machine transcription gives /tʃmu/ (IPA) for Hindi.
- In which country does Tumu have the most bearers?
- In India, the national register counted about 951 people named Tumu, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled tumu.
- How common is the name Tumu?
- In India, the national register counted 951 people named Tumu, about 1 in 1.4 million residents.
What do you want to know about Tumu?
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/tumuThe 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, “Tumu”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.