Žemaitis

surname · Latin script

Meaning: Samogitian (person from Samogitia)

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/ʒʲɛmɐjtʲɪs/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Žemaitis is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 502K(measured from records)
  • LTLithuania≈1 in 7.1K
  • ISIceland≈1 in 78K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

662 people, 2010

Sources
165 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 7.1K (inferred from the name graph)

Lithuania, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

One other spelling is counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Zemaitis in US United States, GB United Kingdom, LT Lithuania and 4 more.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Samogitian (person from Samogitia)

Sources 1

  • kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Attested across 13 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Žemaitis counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.

Where Žemaitis is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—6621 in 502K683Zemaitis165
LT Lithuania#286≈390 est.≈1 in 7.1K—Zemaitis54
GB United Kingdom—≈150 est.≈1 in 436K36Zemaitis39
BR Brazil—≈85 est.≈1 in 2.5M—Zemaitis21
CA Canada—≈81 est.≈1 in 463K—Zemaitis18
NO Norway—601 in 91K60Zemaitis8
FI Finland—221 in 253K22——
JM Jamaica—≈17 est.≈1 in 166K—Zemaitis1
IS Iceland—≈5 est.≈1 in 78Klisted——

662 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.

Registers cited: Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).

Other names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Žemaitis is also recorded as 6 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate name3 spellings in the group

    Also written Zemaitis, Żemaitis

  • Russian surname12 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Russia, Kazakhstan, Türkiye, Ukraine

    Languages: Russian, Ukrainian

    Also written Жемайтис, Жямайтис, Zhemaitis, Zemaitis, Жемаитис

  • French surname2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Canada

    Also written Zemaitis

  • a separate name3 spellings in the group

    Also written Zemaitis

  • Danish surname7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Denmark

    Languages: Danish, Norwegian

    Also written Zemaitis

  • Polish surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Poland, United States

    Also written Zemaitis, Żemaitis

4 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Žemaitis is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Lithuanian, Iš liet. etnonimo žemaitis.

    as a wordVanagas, Lietuvių pavardžių žodynas (Dictionary of Lithuanian Surnames)

  • In Latvian, Etnogrāfiska grupa Lietuvas rietumu daļā (Žemaitijā), kura 13. un 14. gadsimtā cīnījās pret Vācu ordeņa agresiju un 15. gadsimtā iekļāvās Lietuvas lielkņazistē

    as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)

  • In Latvian, šīs grupas piederīgais

    as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)

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(measured from records)

1850190019502000Zigmas Žemaitis, b. 1884Jonas Žemaitis, b. 1909Kęstutis Žemaitis, b. 1960Karolis Žemaitis, b. 1993Kristupas Žemaitis, 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).

How to address them(machine-generated)

FormalGerbiamasis/Gerbiamoji Žemaitis,Dear Žemaitis, (English)
InformalGerbiamasis/Gerbiamoji Žemaitis,Hello, (English)

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 7 sources across 2 countries.

Reference works 4

  • Lietuvių kalbos institutas — Lietuvių pavardžių žodynas (Lithuanian surname dictionary)
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
  • Lietuvių pavardžių žodynas (Dictionary of Lithuanian Surnames)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Žemaitis mean, and where does it come from?
Samogitian (person from Samogitia) Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
How do you pronounce Žemaitis?
A machine transcription gives /ʒʲɛmɐjtʲɪs/ (IPA) for Lithuanian.
In which country does Žemaitis have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 662 people named Žemaitis, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled zemaitis.
How common is the name Žemaitis?
In the United States, the national register counted 662 people named Žemaitis in 2010, about 1 in 502 thousand residents.
How common is Žemaitis compared with other names?
In Lithuania, Žemaitis is the 286th most common surname of 43,479 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Žemaitis?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/%C5%BEemaitis

The payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.

About this data

measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated

These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.

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, “Žemaitis” — the 286th most common surname in Lithuania. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Žemaitis parses inside a full name →