Cloete
surname · Latin script
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 10 countries · latest register: ECN Government Gazette 8791, 2025
/cloɛte/(machine-generated) Swahili · model-generated
Cloete is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Africa than in any other country, where it is the 98th most common surname.
- NANamibia≈1 in 310few records(inferred from the name graph)
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 1.1K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 140Kfew records
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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 109 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 308 (inferred from the name graph)
≈51,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Namibia, 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
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)Cloete 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 | #98 | ≈51,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.1K | — | Cloete | 109 |
| NA Namibia | #7 | ≈8,500 est. | ≈1 in 308 | 5.8K | Cloete | 19 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈180 est. | ≈1 in 142K | — | Cloete | 56 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈180 est. | ≈1 in 372K | — | Cloete | 68 |
| US United States | — | ≈130 est. | ≈1 in 2.7M | listed | Cloete | 94 |
| NZ New Zealand | — | ≈48 est. | ≈1 in 102K | — | Cloete | 22 |
| AE United Arab Emirates | — | ≈34 est. | ≈1 in 294K | — | Cloete | 12 |
| ES Spain | — | 9 | 1 in 5.6M | 9 | Cloete | 3 |
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: This page provides an overview of Namibian surnames and their origins, published by the Namibia Statistics Agency.; the us-wru-surnames-voterfile register; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos). 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).
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- William Broderick Cloeteb. 1851British businessman
- Stuart Cloeteb. 1897ZASouth African writer (1897-1976)
- Johan Cloeteb. 1971ZASouth African cricket umpire
- Hestrie Cloeteb. 1978ZASouth African high jumper
- Gareth Cloeteb. 1978NANamibian cricketer
- Ruben Cloeteb. 1982ZAAssociation footballer
- Tiaan Cloeteb. 1989ZASouth African cricketer
- Gihahn Cloeteb. 1992ZASouth African cricketer
- Achille Cloeteb. 2001South African cricketer
- Ashlynn Cloeteactress
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)15 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 10 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NA Namibia | ECN Government Gazette 8791 — 2025 local authority candidates | 2025 | 10 | #3 |
| NA Namibia | ECN Government Gazette 8791 — 2025 local authority candidates | 2025 | 9 | #7 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 9 | #126,713 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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
- How do you pronounce Cloete?
- In Swahili /cloɛte/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- In which country does Cloete have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 51 thousand people named Cloete in South Africa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled cloete.
- How common is the name Cloete?
- In Spain, the national register counted 9 people named Cloete, about 1 in 5.6 million residents.
- How common is Cloete compared with other names?
- In South Africa, Cloete is the 98th most common surname of 285,788 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Cloete?
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/cloeteThe 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, “Cloete” — the 98th most common surname in South Africa. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.