Jefe
given name · Latin script
Meaning, in English: An officer with political influence; a head or chief in government, such as a sheriff, particularly where that person is Hispanic or of Mexican descent
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/dʒˈiːf/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Jefe is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Colombia than in any other country.
- ISIceland1 in 175K(measured from records)
- COColombia≈1 in 287K
- DODominican Republic≈1 in 417K
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.
- Colombia (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 27 (measured from records)
- 1 in 175K (inferred from the name graph)
≈170 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Iceland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
An officer with political influence; a head or chief in government, such as a sheriff, particularly where that person is Hispanic or of Mexican descent.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.
How Jefe is read(measured from records)
Jefe is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English40%
An officer with political influence; a head or chief in government, such as a sheriff, particularly where that person is Hispanic or of Mexican descent.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Spanish38%
chief; president; head; leader of a business, political party, or other organization
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Portuguese8.8%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Jefe in Portuguese.
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Jefe 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CO Colombia | ≈170 est. | ≈1 in 287K | — | Jefe | 10 |
| US United States | ≈120 est. | ≈1 in 2.7M | 9 | Jefe | 27 |
| PH Philippines | ≈110 est. | ≈1 in 1M | — | Jefe | 6 |
| BR Brazil | 85 | 1 in 2.5M | 94 | Jefe | 27 |
| ES Spain | ≈73 est. | ≈1 in 687K | — | Jefe | 14 |
| CL Chile | ≈39 est. | ≈1 in 467K | — | Jefe | 7 |
| GT Guatemala | ≈29 est. | ≈1 in 593K | — | Jefe | 5 |
| DO Dominican Republic | ≈25 est. | ≈1 in 417K | — | Jefe | 6 |
| IS Iceland | 2 | 1 in 175K | 2 | — | — |
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: IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); Brasil.IO genero-nomes (IBGE Censo 2010 mirror, CC-BY-SA); SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present); Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry). 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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 6 sources across 3 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BR Brazil | Brasil.IO genero-nomes (IBGE Censo 2010 mirror, CC-BY-SA) | — | 94 | #19,417 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2022 | 85 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 80 | #46,211 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Nomes (census name API) | — | 53 | #46,848 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2023 | 9 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2021 | 7 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2020 | 7 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2022 | 5 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2018 | 5 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2017 | 5 | — |
| IS Iceland | Þjóðskrá Íslands — Name frequencies (NafnTíðni, registry) | 2026 | 2 | — |
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Jefe mean, and where does it come from?
- An officer with political influence; a head or chief in government, such as a sheriff, particularly where that person is Hispanic or of Mexican descent. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- How do you pronounce Jefe?
- A machine transcription gives /dʒˈiːf/ (IPA) for English.
- Is Jefe a male or female name?
- Jefe is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- In which country does Jefe have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 171 people named Jefe in Colombia, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled jefe.
- Where is Jefe most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Jefe is densest in Iceland — about 1 in 175 thousand people — even though Colombia holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Jefe?
- In Brazil, the national register counted 85 people named Jefe in 2022, about 1 in 2.5 million residents.
What do you want to know about Jefe?
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/jefeThe 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, “Jefe”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.