Naidu
surname · Hindi · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Naidu is a surname, most frequently recorded in South Africa, where it is the 42nd most common surname. It appears chiefly in Hindi and , written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Hindu name that occurs in several communities of Andhra Pradesh.
- ZASouth Africa1 in 937◐
- SGSingapore1 in 7.8K
- MYMalaysia1 in 8.9K
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- ≈29K ●
- 3 ●
- Sources
- 231 ●
- 1 in 8.1K ◐
across 7 countries
recorded for this name
281K records
Official registry-verified
Guyana
Spellings & scripts●
Locally spelled Naidoo in ZA South Africa, BR Brazil, FR France and 2 more and Найду in RU Russia, FI Finland.
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●
Hindu name that occurs in several communities of Andhra Pradesh. It is ndyu in Telugu, composed of a stem from Sanskrit ndya ‘leader’, ‘chief’ -I- the Telugu third personal masculine suffix -u.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world●
Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZA South Africa | #42 | 32,199 | 30K rec. | — | — | Naidoo | 69 |
| IN India | #618 | 27,276 | 212K rec. | 1 in 49K | 27K | Naidu | 209 |
| MY Malaysia | #535 | 6,179 | 8.5K rec. | — | — | Naidu | 71 |
| AU Australia | — | 5,496 | 5.4K rec. | — | — | Naidu | 131 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | 2,908 | 1.6K rec. | — | — | Naidu | 82 |
| US United States | — | 1,513 | 18K rec. | 1 in 220K | 2K | Naidu | 231 |
| CA Canada | — | 1,287 | 1.2K rec. | — | — | Naidu | 66 |
| SG Singapore | #505 | 1,239 | 1.4K rec. | — | — | Naidu | 61 |
| NZ New Zealand | #803 | 719 | 600 rec. | — | — | Naidu | 49 |
| AE United Arab Emirates | #409 | 469 | 351 rec. | — | — | Naidu | 49 |
| DE Germany | — | 199 | 190 rec. | — | 1 | Naidu | 49 |
| SA Saudi Arabia | — | 175 | 45 rec. | — | — | Naidu | 13 |
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.
Languages●
- Hindi222K45%
- 156K31%
- Telugu56K11%
- English26K5%
- Sinhala7.8K2%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Hindi | 222,114 | 45% |
| 155,972 | 31% | |
| Telugu | 55,738 | 11% |
| English | 26,462 | 5% |
| Sinhala | 7,790 | 2% |
Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.
Other recorded senses●
Naidu is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
Telugu form of the caste title meaning 'lord'.
as a wordsanames.co.za — South African surnames
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●
- Sarojini Naidub. 1879INIndian poet, politician, governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh from1947 to 1949
- Raghupathi Venkaiah Naidub. 1887INIndian film director (1887-1941)
- Padmaja Naidub. 1900INIndian politician (1900–1975)
- Stephen Naidoob. 1937ZAnot in their usual nameCatholic bishop (1937–1989)
- Leela Naidub. 1940INIndian actress (1940–2009)
- Muppavarapu Venkaiah Naidub. 1949INVice President of India from 2017 to 2022
- Shobha Naidub. 1956INIndian dancer
- Ajay Naidub. 1972USAmerican actor
- Meghna Naidub. 1978INIndian actress
- Keshav NaiduIndian film editor
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 30 sources across 18 countries.
Reference works 5
- 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
- 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 · 49 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Naidu?
- We estimate roughly 29 thousand people bear Naidu (counting its spellings and scripts) across 7 countries in our records.
- In which country does Naidu have the most bearers?
- Naidu is most frequently recorded in South Africa, where it is most often spelled naidoo.
- How common is Naidu compared with other names?
- In South Africa, Naidu is the 42nd most common surname of 302,267 surnames recorded there.
- What does the name Naidu mean?
- Recorded meaning: Hindu name that occurs in several communities of Andhra Pradesh.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/naiduThe 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
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, “Naidu” — the 42nd most common surname in South Africa. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.