Bánks
surname · Latin script
Bánks is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Jamaica it is the 83rd most common surname. Recorded meaning: Alexander de Riparia (Latin ‘of the banks’) owned land at Tweedmouth in the early 13th century. Either he or other riparians founded Banks as a surname.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 2.6K(inferred from the name graph)
- JMJamaica≈1 in 2.6K
- USUnited States1 in 3.1K
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)
- #881 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 535 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.6K (inferred from the name graph)
105,833 people, 2010
of 19M surnames, spellings grouped
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
United Kingdom, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Banks in US United States, GB United Kingdom, AU Australia 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)Alexander de Riparia (Latin ‘of the banks’) owned land at Tweedmouth in the early 13th century. Either he or other riparians founded Banks as a surname. The Banks name in Orkney and Caithness, noted as Bankis in 1648, seems an unrelated local location name.
Cited for this meaning 3
- Scottish Surnames
- Wiktionary
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 19 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Bánks 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | #253 | 105,833 | 1 in 3.1K | 106K | Banks | 535 |
| GB United Kingdom | #234 | ≈25,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.6K | listed | Banks | 293 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈9,600 est. | ≈1 in 11K | — | Banks | 21 |
| CA Canada | #413 | ≈8,100 est. | ≈1 in 4.7K | 22 | Banks | 205 |
| AU Australia | #352 | ≈6,700 est. | ≈1 in 3.8K | — | Banks | 215 |
| NZ New Zealand | #313 | ≈1,300 est. | ≈1 in 3.8K | 24 | Banks | 109 |
| JM Jamaica | #83 | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 2.6K | — | Banks | 13 |
105,833 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; Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present). 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).
Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Bánks mean, and where does it come from?
- Alexander de Riparia (Latin ‘of the banks’) owned land at Tweedmouth in the early 13th century. Either he or other riparians founded Banks as a surname. Recorded by Scottish Surnames and Wiktionary and 1 other source.
- In which country does Bánks have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 106 thousand people named Bánks, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled banks.
- How common is the name Bánks?
- In the United States, the national register counted 105,833 people named Bánks in 2010, about 1 in 3.1 thousand residents.
- How common is Bánks compared with other names?
- In the United States, Bánks is the 253rd most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Bánks?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/b%C3%A1nksThe 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, “Bánks” — the 253rd most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.