Lawal
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Hausa-Fulani name for first; from the Arabic sequence name
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 20 countries
Lawal is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Nigeria it is the 7th most common surname.
- USUnited States1 in 257K(measured from records)
- NGNigeria≈1 in 11M
- FIFinland1 in 71K
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.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 285 (measured from records)
- 1 in 71K (inferred from the name graph)
1,292 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Finland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Hausa-Fulani name for first; from the Arabic sequence name
Cited for this meaning 1
- African Muslim Names
Where in the world
(measured from records)Lawal 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 1,292 | 1 in 257K | 2.6K | Lawal | 285 |
| BR Brazil | — | 115 | 1 in 1.8M | 115 | — | 1 |
| ES Spain | — | 100 | 1 in 500K | 100 | — | 24 |
| FI Finland | — | 79 | 1 in 71K | 79 | — | 4 |
| PL Poland | — | 48 | 1 in 798K | 26 | — | 1 |
| NO Norway | — | 42 | 1 in 130K | 42 | — | 8 |
| DK Denmark | — | 32 | 1 in 183K | 32 | Lawal | 14 |
| NG Nigeria | #7 | ≈20 est. | ≈1 in 11M | listed | Lawal | 156 |
| GD Grenada | — | 1 | 1 in 113K | 1 | — | — |
1,292 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 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)Lawal is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Swahili, the first one
as a nameAfrican Muslim Names
In arn, Patagonian cypress, alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In ami, flying squirrel
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)- Adekunle Lawalb. 1934NGNigerian politician (1934–1980)
- Adebayo Lawalb. 1941NGNigerian politician (1941–2024)
- Amina Lawalb. 1973NGNigerian sentenced to death
- Muhammed Lawalb. 1981USAmerican mixed martial artist and professional wrestler
- Olaseni Lawalb. 1986NGNigerian basketball player (born 1986)
- Gani Lawalb. 1988USNigerian-American basketball player
- Raheem Lawalb. 1990NGNigerian footballer
- Rafiatu Folashade Lawalb. 1996NGNigerian weightlifter
- Taiwo Busirat Lawalb. 2004NGNigerian association football player
- Zainab Lawal GummiNGcommissioner for Women, Children and Social Development, Zamfara State
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)30 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 20 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 10 | #43,699 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 10 | #43,117 |
| NG Nigeria | MasakhaNER 2.0 — Zimbabwe (sna) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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
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 Lawal mean, and where does it come from?
- Hausa-Fulani name for first; from the Arabic sequence name Recorded by African Muslim Names.
- In which country does Lawal have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 1.3 thousand people named Lawal, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled lawal.
- Where is Lawal most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Lawal is densest in Finland — about 1 in 71 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Lawal?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,292 people named Lawal in 2010, about 1 in 257 thousand residents.
- How common is Lawal compared with other names?
- In Nigeria, Lawal is the 7th most common surname of 346,007 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Lawal?
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/lawalThe 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, “Lawal” — the 7th most common surname in Nigeria. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.