Tefo
given name · English · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Tefo is a given name, most frequently recorded in South Africa. In Botswana it is the 58th most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and Southern Sotho, written in the Latin script.
- ZASouth Africa1 in 9.3K◐
- BWBotswana1 in 4.3K
- ETEthiopia1 in 268K
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- 4.3K ●
- 2 ●
- Sources
- 32 ●
in 5 countries
recorded for this name
4.7K records
Official registry-verified
Spellings & scripts●
Locally spelled ተፎ in ET Ethiopia.
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
No verified etymology recorded for this name yet — the entries below are drawn from usage statistics and the name graph.
Where in the world●
Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZA South Africa | — | 3,629 | 4.3K rec. | — | — | Tefo | 26 |
| US United States | — | 39 | 114 rec. | — | — | Tefo | 32 |
| DE Germany | — | 25 | 35 rec. | — | — | Tefo | 11 |
| BW Botswana | #58 | 19 | 102 rec. | — | — | Tefo | 22 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | 18 | 19 rec. | — | — | Tefo | 14 |
| ET Ethiopia | — | 13 | 10 rec. | — | — | ተፎ | 2 |
| TR Türkiye | — | 5 | 4 rec. | — | — | Tefo | 3 |
| AU Australia | — | 5 | 9 rec. | — | — | Tefo | 4 |
| IN India | — | — | 2 rec. | — | 6 | — | 4 |
| LS Lesotho | — | — | 1 rec. | — | 4 | — | 4 |
| EE Estonia | — | — | — | — | listed | — | — |
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.
Languages●
- English2.2K49%
- Southern Sotho68015%
- Swahili44310%
- English (South Africa)1824%
- Amharic1664%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| English | 2,205 | 49% |
| Southern Sotho | 680 | 15% |
| Swahili | 443 | 10% |
| English (South Africa) | 182 | 4% |
| Amharic | 166 | 4% |
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●
Tefo 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.
In Tswana, Setswana surname meaning 'payment'.
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●
- Tefo Kabomob. 1995BWbadminton player
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 3 sources across 2 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LS Lesotho | Lesotho IEC 2022 National Assembly candidate lists | 2022 | 4 | #17 |
| LS Lesotho | Lesotho IEC 2022 National Assembly candidate lists | 2022 | 1 | #13 |
| EE Estonia | Siseministeerium — population register name list 2023 | 2023 | — | — |
Reference works 1
- 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 · 3 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Tefo?
- Our records include 4,332 bearers of Tefo across 5 countries — a sample of the full distribution.
- In which country does Tefo have the most bearers?
- Tefo is most frequently recorded in South Africa, where it is most often spelled tefo.
- How common is Tefo compared with other names?
- In Botswana, Tefo is the 58th most common given name of 293 given names recorded there.
- Is Tefo a male or female name?
- Tefo 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.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/tefoThe 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, “Tefo” — the 58th most common given name in Botswana. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.