Dad
surname · Latin script
Meaning: informal for father (Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 19 countries
Dad is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in India than in any other country. Dad is also written ใดดา in Thai, দাদ in Bengali and దద in Telugu.
- DKDenmark1 in 457as Nanna(measured from records)
- ISIceland1 in 1.3Kas Nanna
- SESweden1 in 4Kas Nanna
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Dad itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. 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)
- 4 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 89 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 19K (inferred from the name graph)
≈150,000 named Dada, est.
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Afghanistan, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Dad in other scripts: Latin, Thai, Bengali and 1 more
(measured from records)Locally spelled Dada in IN India, NG Nigeria, BD Bangladesh, Nanne in SE Sweden, FI Finland and Dadi in TZ Tanzania.
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
(measured from records)informal for father
Cited for this meaning 1
- Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Dad 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 | ≈150,000 est. | ≈1 in 9.7K | 5.5K | Dada | 86 |
| NG Nigeria | ≈54,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.3K | listed | Dada | 38 |
| DK Denmark | 12,831as Nanna | 1 in 457 | 13K | — | 1 |
| TZ Tanzania | ≈3,900 est. | ≈1 in 18K | 8 | Dadi | 11 |
| BD Bangladesh | ≈3,100 est. | ≈1 in 56K | — | Dada | 14 |
| SE Sweden | 2,553as Nanna | 1 in 4K | 2.6K | Nanne | 5 |
| AF Afghanistan | ≈2,300 est. | ≈1 in 19K | — | Dad | 20 |
| FI Finland | 1,125as Nanna | 1 in 5K | 1.4K | Nanne | 7 |
| IS Iceland | 274as Nanna | 1 in 1.3K | 296 | — | — |
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; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); INEC Special Gazette 2021 — 2020 parliamentary election results; Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry); Hagstofa Íslands — Given-name frequency by population (2005). 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)Dad 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 Akan, e-gyd, 1. the first pain of a cid from a sharp iron. — 2. tlie flashing of bright iron; Nali.2,4. cf. gsekannya
as a wordDictionary of the Asante and Fante Language called Tshi (Chwee, Twi)
In Russian, Dad. 13-14th Centuries.
as a wordA Dictionary of Period Russian Names (Wickenden / Goldschmidt 1996)
In cau-lzg-pro, cock
as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)
In rgn, clipping of dàdo (“a dear”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Scottish Gaelic, anything, ought, (in the negative) nothing
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)- Dad Shahb. 1944IRIranian rebel
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 19 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Dad mean, and where does it come from?
- informal for father Recorded by Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names.
- What are other forms of the name Dad?
- In the etymology graph, DaddiO is a form of the same name in other languages.
- Which countries have the most people named Dad?
- Mondonomo estimates about 149 thousand people named Dada in India, more than in any other country we hold. After it come Nigeria, Denmark, Tanzania and Bangladesh; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Dad?
- In Denmark, the national register counted 12,831 people named Nanna, about 1 in 457 residents.
What do you want to know about Dad?
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/dadThe 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, “Dad” — ranked 1471st in India (Instate). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.