Sele
surname · English · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Sele is a surname, with more bearers in Norway than in any other country. In Liechtenstein it is the 26th most common surname. It appears chiefly in English and Norwegian Bokmål, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: a harness (usually for horses, dogs and small children).
- USUnited States1 in 1.3M◐
- LILiechtenstein1 in 134
- NONorway1 in 4.7K
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- ≈1.7K ●
- Sources
- 87 ●
- 1 in 4.7K ◐
across 11 countries
3.9K records
Official registry-verified
Norway
Spellings & scripts●
Locally spelled Şele in TR Türkiye.
Meaning & origin●
a harness (usually for horses, dogs and small children)
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world●
Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NO Norway | — | 1,164△ | 33 rec. | 1 in 4.7K | 1.2K | Sele | 21 |
| LI Liechtenstein | #26 | 444 | 10 rec. | — | 195 | Sele | 18 |
| US United States | — | 260 | 2.4K rec. | 1 in 1.3M | 317 | Sele | 87 |
| ZA South Africa | — | 185 | 304 rec. | — | — | Sele | 10 |
| NG Nigeria | — | 165 | 303 rec. | — | — | Sele | 33 |
| BR Brazil | — | 150 | 0 rec. | 1 in 1.4M | 150 | — | 1 |
| DE Germany | — | 88 | 159 rec. | — | — | Sele | 29 |
| CA Canada | — | 73 | 75 rec. | — | — | Sele | 11 |
| AU Australia | — | 49 | 54 rec. | — | — | Sele | 13 |
| CH Switzerland | — | 45 | 32 rec. | 1 in 187K | 45 | Sele | 11 |
| TZ Tanzania | — | 43 | 39 rec. | — | — | Sele | 13 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | 40 | 55 rec. | — | — | Sele | 14 |
Roughly 1.2K people in Norway bear this name (about 1 in 4.7K). 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●
- English2.7K33%
- Norwegian Bokmål1.2K14%
- German7099%
- Swahili6618%
- French4415%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| English | 2,716 | 33% |
| Norwegian Bokmål | 1,164 | 14% |
| German | 709 | 9% |
| Swahili | 661 | 8% |
| French | 441 | 5% |
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●
Sele 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 Turkish, a wide wicker basket
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Happiness, fortune.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In men, or Jele "ofe" "^P to nve in blue mottled with brown
as a wordMende Natural History Vocabulary
In tuw-pro, iron
as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)
In Swedish, a harness (for a horse or other draft animal)
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.
Over time●
Show as table
| Year | records |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 570 |
| 2019 | 572 |
| 2020 | 577 |
| 2021 | 581 |
| 2022 | 583 |
| 2023 | 587 |
| 2024 | 586 |
| 2025 | 582 |
NO SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891) — 8 years between 2018–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.
Notable people with this name●
- Josef Seleb. 1897LILiechtensteiner politician
- Remo Seleb. 1948LILiechtenstein sports shooter
- Hubert Seleb. 1955LILiechtensteiner politician
- Dag Seleb. 1964NONorwegian politician
- Aaron Seleb. 1970USbaseball player
- Erik Meling Seleb. 1987NONorwegian writer
- Richard Seleb. 1989FRFrench association football player
- Mathias Seleb. 1992LILiechtensteiner association football player
- Aron Seleb. 1996LIassociation football player
- Hame Seleb. 1996AUAustralian rugby league footballer (b. 1996)
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 33 sources across 21 countries.
Reference works 4
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- 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 · 73 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Sele?
- We estimate roughly 1.7 thousand people bear Sele (counting its spellings and scripts) across 11 countries in our records.
- In which country does Sele have the most bearers?
- We estimate about 1.2 thousand people bear Sele in Norway, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled sele.
- How common is Sele compared with other names?
- In Liechtenstein, Sele is the 26th most common surname of 657 surnames recorded there.
- What does the name Sele mean?
- Recorded meaning: a harness (usually for horses, dogs and small children)
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/seleThe 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, “Sele” — the 26th most common surname in Liechtenstein. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.