Tale
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: A rehearsal of what has occurred; narrative; discourse; statement; history; story
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/teɪl/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Tale is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Africa than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 1.6M(measured from records)
- ARArgentina1 in 505K
- INIndia1 in 4.9M
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 Tale itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- South Africa (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 91 (measured from records)
- 1 in 505K (inferred from the name graph)
≈860 named Taele, est.
Highest-authority source
Argentina
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Taele in ZA South Africa, AO Angola.
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)
A rehearsal of what has occurred; narrative; discourse; statement; history; story.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 6 languages in the etymology graph.
How Tale is read(measured from records)
Tale 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.
- Hindi66%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Tale in Hindi.
- English12%
A rehearsal of what has occurred; narrative; discourse; statement; history; story.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
njia, dome
as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language
- Spanish8.7%
inflection of talar:
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)
Tale 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 | ≈860 est. | ≈1 in 66K | — | Taele | 11 |
| AO Angola | ≈390 est. | ≈1 in 84K | — | Taele | 1 |
| IN India | 273 | 1 in 4.9M | 273 | Tale | 34 |
| US United States | 210 | 1 in 1.6M | 315 | Tale | 91 |
| AR Argentina | 90 | 1 in 505K | 90 | — | — |
| LS Lesotho | ≈2 est. | ≈1 in 1.1M | 1 | — | 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: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Lesotho IEC 2022 National Assembly candidate lists. 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)
Tale 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 German, ) Thale; Talea; Thalea: weibl. Vom., niederdeutsch-friesische und niederlän dische Koseform von
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
Green.
as a nameThe African book of names
Verde
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
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)
- Petar Taleb. 1947NONorwegian painter
- Babu Taleb. 1982TZTanzanian MP
- Thapelo Taleb. 1988LSMosotho footballer
- Nazif Taleactor
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)
Attested in 43 sources across 22 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 315 | #67,529 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 273 | #14,287 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 262 | #11,689 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 210 | #88,336 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 126 | #125,639 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 90 | — |
| LS Lesotho | Lesotho IEC 2022 National Assembly candidate lists | 2022 | 1 | #13 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Ethiopian name tokens (GitHub lehagere/ethiopian-names, 40/60 condominium list)
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 Tale mean, and where does it come from?
- A rehearsal of what has occurred; narrative; discourse; statement; history; story. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- What are other forms of the name Tale?
- In the etymology graph, Zahl is a form of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Tale?
- A machine transcription gives /teɪl/ (IPA) for Hindi.
- In which country does Tale have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 857 people named Taele in South Africa, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Tale most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Tale is densest in Argentina — about 1 in 505 thousand people — even though South Africa holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Tale?
- In India, the national register counted 273 people named Tale, about 1 in 4.9 million residents.
What do you want to know about Tale?
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/taleThe 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, “Tale”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.