Malik

surname · Hindi · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Malik is a surname, with more bearers in India than in any other country, where it is the 88th most common surname. It appears chiefly in Hindi and , written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: ‘ruler, chief’, from Arabic malik ‘king’.

rarermore common
  • PKPakistan1 in 410◐
  • AEUnited Arab Emirates1 in 614
  • SASaudi Arabia1 in 725

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈702K ●

across 10 countries

#492 ●

of 21M surnames

4 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
309 ●

1.2M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 2.0K ◐

India

Spellings & scripts●

MalikLatin · Hindi●2.1M records
মালিকBengali · Bangla●5.6K records
ᲛალიკGeorgian · Georgian●226 records
ਮੌਲਿਕGurmukhi · Punjabi●1 records

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Maalik in BE Belgium.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin●

‘ruler, chief’, from Arabic malik ‘king’.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 6 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Malik is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
IN India#88675,3601.1M rec.1 in 2K675KMalik250
PK Pakistan#47122,63637K rec.—listedMalik141
GB United Kingdom—15,0336.8K rec.——Malik140
US United States—14,92559K rec.1 in 22K37KMalik309
SA Saudi Arabia#4312,8236.4K rec.——Malik104
AE United Arab Emirates#215,7529.5K rec.——Malik124
MY Malaysia#7813,9143.4K rec.——Malik45
PL Poland—3,655—1 in 10K3.7K——
CZ Czechia—2,726—1 in 3.9K2.7K——
EG Egypt—2,4902.4K rec.——Malik55
CA Canada—2,4752.7K rec.—34Malik115
NO Norway—2,394△266 rec.1 in 2.3K2.4K—34

Roughly 675K people in India bear this name (about 1 in 2K). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked △ rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages●

  • Hindi2.1M63%
  • 378K12%
  • English240K7%
  • Urdu158K5%
  • Vietnamese59K2%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
Hindi2,071,22463%
377,97912%
English239,5647%
Urdu158,3205%
Vietnamese59,4072%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way◐

Malik is also recorded as 7 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • English surname545K records spelled Malik59 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, India, United Kingdom, Pakistan

    Languages: English, German, Dutch

    Also written Ma'Lik, Ma-Lik, Mali'K, Mälik, Mälïk

  • a separate surname409K records spelled Malik7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in India, Pakistan, United States, United Kingdom

    Also written Mālik, Malík, Mălik, Málik, Maliḳ

  • Spanish surname170K records spelled Malik8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, India, Spain

    Languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese

    Also written Ma'Lik, Mälïk, Målik, Malík, Mālik

  • Indonesian surname70K records spelled Malik4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Pakistan

    Also written Malik', 'Malik, Mãlîk

  • Russian given name62K records spelled Malik53 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan

    Languages: Russian, Uzbek, Ukrainian

    Also written Малик, Малік, Малык, Malyk, Malick

  • Polish surname54K records spelled Malik25 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Poland, Czechia, India, Slovakia

    Languages: Polish, Czech, Slovak

    Also written Mälik, Maliķ, Mãlîk, Målîk, Máĺík

  • Danish surname15K records spelled Malik37 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Norway, India, Denmark, United States

    Languages: Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Swedish

    Also written Maalik, Målįk, Mālïk, Målïk, Máľîk

68 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses●

Malik 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 Arabic, Muslim/Arabic: 'king'; popular among the Wolof of Senegal

    as a nameAfrican Names

  • In Arabic, ‘king, owner’; also a divine name in Islam.

    as a nameAfrican Muslim Names

  • nickname for a small person, from a pet form of a vocabulary word meaning ‘small’ (Polish maty, Czech maly ‘small’, Slovenian mali). Compare Maly.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In Arabic, Owner

    as a nameThe book of African names

  • In Arabic, an attribute of Allah; king, sovereign

    as a nameA Dictionary of Muslim Names

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.

Over time●

0200400600190019201940196019802000436 · 1984

Show as table
Malik in naampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls), India, 1899–2015
Yearrecords
18991
19151
19161
19183
19191
19205
19215
19223
19234
19248
19256
192611
19275
192811
192919
193010
193112
193221
193327
193429
193527
193630
193733
193828
193944
194045
194157
194256
194352
194474
194580
194684
194790
194887
194983
1950106
1951117
1952128
1953114
1954151
1955132
1956121
1957148
1958201
1959221
1960164
1961182
1962275
1963251
1964262
1965266
1966225
1967297
1968262
1969280
1970288
1971301
1972328
1973309
1974351
1975337
1976347
1977306
1978366
1979343
1980307
1981350
1982424
1983413
1984436
1985389
1986349
1987416
1988402
1989386
1990388
1991408
1992415
1993430
1994360
1995294
1996178
1997154
199891
19993
200838
20094
201020
201138
201220
201339
201458
201550

IN naampy — India given names from state electoral rolls (in-rolls) — 93 years between 1899–2015. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

190019502000Charles Malik, b. 1906Yakov Malik, b. 1906Adam Malik, b. 1917Rehman Malik, b. 1951Art Malik, b. 1952Anu Malik, b. 1960Julia Malik, b. 1976Veena Malik, b. 1984Sakshi Malik, b. 1992Zayn Malik, b. 1993

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●

Attested in 119 sources across 62 countries.

Official registers attesting Malik
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls—675K#39
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202037K#1,097
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202018K#1,908
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201015K#2,429
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des prénoms (1900–2024)202413K#231
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200010K#3,172
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)20263.7K—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—3.7K#616
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)20263.5K—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—3.5K#635
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—2.4K#377
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—1.7K#250

Reference works 7

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 1,042 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Malik?
We estimate roughly 702 thousand people bear Malik (counting its spellings and scripts) across 10 countries in our records.
In which country does Malik have the most bearers?
We estimate about 675 thousand people bear Malik in India, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled malik.
How common is Malik compared with other names?
In India, Malik is the 88th most common surname of 2,352,292 surnames recorded there.
What does the name Malik mean?
Recorded meaning: ‘ruler, chief’, from Arabic malik ‘king’.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/malik

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

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, “Malik” — the 88th most common surname in India. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Malik parses inside a full name →