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Tel

Tel. Attested in France, Spain, Belgium, borne by about 885 people in the registers this map holds.

The same name, spelt two ways

One systematic substitution — s for z, w for v, ch for h — where BOTH spellings are independently attested surnames. Kosina and Kozina are one man in two clerks' handwriting. Stronger than sounding alike, weaker than somebody having checked.

TellThel

Only sounds alike

An algorithm's guess. Useful for casting a net, and not evidence.

TalTilTolTulTylTaelTealTeel

It is also the name of a place

2 places drawn, the largest being Tel, TellTell — 1Tel — 290
Where those places are. A dot is a settlement whose name is this surname, sized by its population — not a claim that anybody of the name lives there. Phonetic neighbours are listed below but not drawn: putting a machine's guess on the ground would dress it up as geography.

This is as close to an origin as this map will go. A surname that is also a place name often came from it — and often did not: plenty are occupations or patronymics that happen to collide with a place, and plenty of places are named after a family rather than the other way round. It is a fact with a source, which is more than an etymology page offers.

  • Tel Italy pop. 290
  • Tell United States of America a spelling of the name
  • Tāl India pop. 14,913 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Tal Austria pop. 662 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Tol Italy pop. 12 only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling
  • Tal Germany only a phonetic neighbour, not a spelling

Where it is borne, and where a record names it

Attested in 3 countries: France, Spain, BelgiumBelgium — 8 peopleSpain — 242 peopleFrance — 635 people
A dot is a country, not a place. It sits at the country's centre because a national register counts a country; nothing here says where in it these people are. Blank is not absence. This draws the 3 countries where the eleven registers and eight archives behind this atlas attest the name. Most of the world has no surname register this project can read, and the ones that do and will not are listed with the reason.
Belgium, by commune. 8 people in 1 of Belgium's 565 communes, counted by Statbel. The biggest is Beloeil with 8. This is the only country here that can be drawn this way — every other register counts a country and stops, so a blank elsewhere is a gap in what states publish, not in the name.
1 place drawn, the largest being BeloeilBeloeil — 8

Country by country

Each country below can carry up to three different kinds of evidence, and none of them is the same claim. A register is a head-count — a state counted these people. A record is one document naming the surname on that ground, narrower evidence and often much older. And a volume overlapping these dates is a document from the right place and years — never a document known to name this surname. None of the three ever means the name exists in that country and nowhere else, or that it exists nowhere but here.

France

635 Borne — a state counted them — Fichier des noms de famille 1891–2000 (INSEE, fichier national).

Whose archive to write to

245 of 1,513 volumes held for France overlap the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1990s and 2000s — the decades Tel is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Tel. The commonest kinds: Civil registration and vital records, Censuses and population lists, Church and parish registers. See everything this atlas holds for France →

Spain

242 Borne — a state counted them — Frecuencia de apellidos, Censos de población (INE).

Whose archive to write to

6,532 of 35,936 volumes held for Spain overlap the 1860s and 1900s — the decades Tel is attested here. Too many to list, and this atlas does not know whether any one of them names Tel. The commonest kinds: Church and parish registers, Probate, land and notarial, Civil registration and vital records, Immigration and emigration. See everything this atlas holds for Spain →

Belgium

8 Borne — a state counted them — Family names by municipality, 1 January 2026 (Statbel, TA_POP_LST_2026).

Whose archive to write to

This atlas has no birth-year evidence for Tel in Belgium, so it cannot narrow Belgium's 24,426 volumes by date — see Belgium's own page for all of it.

When it was being born, in France

INSEE counts births by surname and decade from the état civil, 1891 to 2000 — the only dated evidence in this dataset. A name that starts at zero and climbs arrived; a name that falls to nothing left, died out, or emigrated, and the decade it stops is the decade to stop searching. It counts births registered in France, so a family that emigrated in 1900 simply stops appearing, which is information rather than a defect.

  • 1891–1900 16
  • 1901–1910 24
  • 1911–1920 18
  • 1921–1930 43
  • 1931–1940 53
  • 1941–1950 57
  • 1951–1960 73
  • 1961–1970 105
  • 1971–1980 105
  • 1981–1990 77
  • 1991–2000 64

Whose archive held that ground, and when

Every surname site can tell you a name is common somewhere. This one also knows which filing system held that ground in which years — and those are the two halves of one question: my people were called this, they were there, so who has the paper, and for which century. A name in Croatia before 1881 may sit in a military series and not a county one; a name in the Netherlands before 1811 has no civil record at all, only a baptism.

This is about the ground, not about your family. A register counting a name in a country says nothing about which village. And these are the pieces of a country this atlas has drawn, which in a large one may be a corner of it — Acadia reaches into Maine and is not a statement about the United States, and Bohemia's ground crosses into Poland. Each region's own page says which ground it covers. Where a country is missing below, nothing covers it yet.

France
Belgium

No record region is drawn yet for Spain — which is a gap in this atlas and not a statement about that country.

Find Tel on the map →

The surname dataset · CC0, and downloadable