Entry № 10455 · Shona origin

Tendai Tendai — Meaning, Origin & Baby Name Popularity

/ ten-DAH-ee /
Gender
Girl
Origin
Shona
Meaning
"Be grateful, give thanks"
Syllables
2
First recorded
Modern (Shona)

A name that means "be grateful, give thanks".

Tendai is the Shona word for "give thanks" or "be grateful" — used as a unisex name across Zimbabwe.

Tendai Mtawarira (born 1985), the South African-born Zimbabwean rugby player who won the 2019 Rugby World Cup with the Springboks, is a notable bearer (the masculine usage).

Be grateful. The Shona thanksgiving.

The name in its native script.

Tendai
Transliteration
Tendai
Pronunciation
/ tɛnˈdɑː.iː /
Root
Grammatical form

Where Tendai stands.

Tendai does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.

Tendais before her.

Real people
Tendai Mutsekwa
Zimbabwean academic.
In fiction
Tendai
Common in Zimbabwean fiction.

Names connected to Tendai.

The number behind Tendai.

8

The Visionary

In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Tendai reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.