Mahmoud
An Arabic name meaning "praised" or "worthy of praise". Fewer than 400 men in Poland carry it and no boys were given it last year, so most Poles have never met one.
Mahmoud Pronunciation
Mahmoud is pronounced mahkh-MO-oot (/maxˈmɔut/).
What Mahmoud means
Where Mahmoud comes from and what it has meant to the people who carry it.
Mahmoud comes from Arabic, from the three-letter root ḥ-m-d, which means to praise. As a grammatical form the name is a passive participle, so it says: the one who is praised, the praiseworthy. In Polish that comes out as chwalebny, godny pochwały.
The same root feeds a small family of names. Muhammad, Ahmad, and Hamid all grow from ḥ-m-d, each turning the idea of praise a slightly different way. Mahmoud sits among them as the one on the receiving end of it.
History gives the name real bearers. Mahmud of Ghazni, a sultan who ruled around the year 1000, carried it across a wide empire. Much closer to us, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941 to 2008) wrote some of the most widely read Arabic verse of the last century.
In a Polish szkoła the name now turns up on a class register beside Antoni and Zofia. The spelling stays Arabic, and so does the meaning: praised, praiseworthy.
How many people are named Mahmoud
1 in 57692 men in Poland is named Mahmoud. 370 people carry it in the 2025 register: rank #1550 among male names.
Mahmoud as a middle name
Mahmoud is a first name for 370 men in Poland and a middle name for another 142, a 72/28 split. In the men's middle-name ranking it sits 591st, between Ethan (142) and Stiven (142).
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#589 Christophe142
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#590 Ethan142
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#591 Mahmoud142
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#592 Stiven142
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#593 Emilio141