Fränken

surname · Latin script

Meaning: Toponymic surname, umlaut/spelling variant of Franken from the place/region name Franken; bearer count 46

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

Fränken is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • NLNetherlands1 in 2.5K(measured from records)
  • DEGermany≈1 in 15K
  • USUnited States1 in 45Kas Franke

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Fränken itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

China (inferred from the name graph)

≈9,300 people, est.

Sources
253 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 2.5K (inferred from the name graph)

Netherlands

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

2 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Franken in DE Germany, NL Netherlands, BE Belgium and 3 more and Franconia in US United States.

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)

Toponymic surname, umlaut/spelling variant of Franken from the place/region name Franken; bearer count 46.

Sources 1

  • Deutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte

Attested across 32 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Fränken 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 Fränken is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
CN China—≈9,300 est.≈1 in 150K—Franken4
US United States—7,359as Franke1 in 45K7.4KFranconia253
NL Netherlands#1647,0131 in 2.5K7KFranken89
DE Germany—≈5,500 est.≈1 in 15KlistedFranken140
PL Poland—1,611as Franke1 in 24K857Franken1
BE Belgium—9251 in 13K925Franken39
CH Switzerland—432as Franke1 in 19K432Franken24

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 2000; the dfa-band-4 register; CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames). 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)

Fränken is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Franken

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)

Fränken is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In German, Toponymic surname of origin from a place/region name; umlauted variant of Franken. Bearer count 46.

    as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte

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)

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).

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 3 sources across 1 country.

Official registers attesting Fränken
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
DE GermanyDeutscher Familiennamenatlas Band 4———

Reference works 2

  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

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 Fränken mean, and where does it come from?
Toponymic surname, umlaut/spelling variant of Franken from the place/region name Franken; bearer count 46. Recorded by Deutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte.
In which country does Fränken have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 9.3 thousand people named Fränken in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled franken.
Where is Fränken most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Fränken is densest in the Netherlands — about 1 in 2.5 thousand people — even though China holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Fränken?
In the Netherlands, the national register counted 7,013 people named Fränken in 2007, about 1 in 2.5 thousand residents.
How common is Fränken compared with other names?
In the Netherlands, Fränken is the 164th most common surname of 284,143 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Fränken?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/fr%C3%A4nken

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, “Fränken” — the 164th most common surname in Netherlands. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Fränken parses inside a full name →