Kleis
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from the personal name Kleis, a South German variant of Klaus
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Kleis is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- DKDenmark1 in 29K(measured from records)
- NLNetherlands1 in 97K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 210K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 48 (measured from records)
- 1 in 29K (inferred from the name graph)
626 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Denmark
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from the personal name Kleis, a South German variant of Klaus.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kleis 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 | 626 | 1 in 531K | 663 | Kleis | 24 |
| BR Brazil | 269 | 1 in 787K | 269 | Kleis | 48 |
| DK Denmark | 200 | 1 in 29K | 200 | — | — |
| NL Netherlands | 178 | 1 in 97K | 178 | Kleis | 4 |
| BE Belgium | 49 | 1 in 239K | 49 | — | 2 |
| CH Switzerland | 40 | 1 in 210K | 40 | — | 4 |
| SE Sweden | 22 | 1 in 464K | 22 | — | 1 |
626 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 2000; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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 recorded senses(measured from records)
Kleis is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In German, from Nicolaus
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
In Breton, marque, éraflure
as a wordDeshayes, Dictionnaire étymologique du breton (2003)
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)
- Richard Kleisb. 1896EEEstonian linguist and philologist (1896-1982)
- Ilmar Kleisb. 1930EEEstonian technologist (1930-2015)
- Ger Kleisb. 1940NLDutch writer and poet
- Marián Kleisb. 1950SKSlovak actor
- Birgit Kleisb. 1956DKDanish politician
- Mikkel Kleisb. 1980Danish athletics competitor
- Jean-Guillaume Kleisb. 1988FRFrench businessperson
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 25 sources across 14 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 663 | #32,652 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 626 | #35,866 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 611 | #38,939 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 269 | #28,891 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 200 | #2,510 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 178 | #11,619 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 49 | #26,646 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 40 | #22,077 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 22 | #23,914 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 6
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Søndergaard, Georg, Danske efternavne (Lademann 1984/1991)
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 Kleis mean, and where does it come from?
- from the personal name Kleis, a South German variant of Klaus. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Kleis have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 626 people named Kleis, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kleis.
- Where is Kleis most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Kleis is densest in Denmark — about 1 in 29 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Kleis?
- In the United States, the national register counted 626 people named Kleis in 2010, about 1 in 531 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Kleis?
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/kleisThe 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, “Kleis”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.