Chef
org · Latin script
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 10 countries · latest register: INSEE, 1991
Chef is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country. Recorded meaning: head, leader, boss.
- SGSingapore≈1 in 520Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- JMJamaica≈1 in 610Kfew records
- GYGuyana1 in 750K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- India (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 119 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 523K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,100 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Singapore, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)head, leader, boss
Cited for this meaning 1
- A Frequency Dictionary of German
Attested across 9 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Chef 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 | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 1.3M | — | Chef | 24 |
| US United States | ≈300 est. | ≈1 in 1.1M | — | Chef | 119 |
| BR Brazil | ≈58 est. | ≈1 in 3.7M | 27 | — | — |
| FR France | ≈45 est. | ≈1 in 1.5M | 45 | — | 2 |
| CA Canada | ≈24 est. | ≈1 in 1.7M | — | Chef | 29 |
| NL Netherlands | 14 | 1 in 1.2M | 14 | Chef | 6 |
| SG Singapore | ≈12 est. | ≈1 in 523K | — | Chef | 8 |
| JM Jamaica | ≈5 est. | ≈1 in 610K | — | Chef | 3 |
| GY Guyana | 1 | 1 in 750K | 1 | — | — |
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: Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); 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).
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Genia Chefb. 1954KZRussian artist
- Monika Chefb. 1958DEGerman politician
- Adrien Cheffilm producer
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)13 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 10 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Chef mean, and where does it come from?
- head, leader, boss Recorded by A Frequency Dictionary of German.
- Which countries have the most people named Chef?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.1 thousand people named Chef in India, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled chef. After it come United States, Brazil, France and Canada; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Chef?
- In the Netherlands, the national register counted 14 people named Chef, about 1 in 1.2 million residents.
What do you want to know about Chef?
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/chefThe 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, “Chef”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.