Mäyer
surname · Latin script
Mäyer is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: status name for a mayor. Middle English, Old French mair(e) (from Latin maior ‘greater’, ‘superior’; compare Mayor).
- UYUruguay1 in 5.7K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 8.4K
- ARArgentina1 in 11K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 276 (measured from records)
- 1 in 3.5K (inferred from the name graph)
39,555 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Switzerland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Mayer in US United States, CH Switzerland, BF Burkina Faso.
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)status name for a mayor. Middle English, Old French mair(e) (from Latin maior ‘greater’, ‘superior’; compare Mayor). In France the title denoted various minor local officials, and the same is tme of Scotland (see Mair 1). In England, however, the term was normally restricted to the chief officer of a borough, and the surname may have been given not only to a citizen of some standing who had held this office, but also as a nickname to a pompous or officious person.
Cited for this meaning 6
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Dizionario dei cognomi italiani
- Wiktionary
- Dicionario Sefaradi De SobrenomesDictionary Of Sephardic Surnames Inclusive Cristaos-Novos, Conversos, Marranos, Italianos,…
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 16 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Mäyer 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 | — | 39,555 | 1 in 8.4K | 40K | Mayer | 191 |
| AR Argentina | — | 4,259 | 1 in 11K | 4.3K | — | 1 |
| CH Switzerland | — | 2,378 | 1 in 3.5K | 2.4K | Mayer | 34 |
| CZ Czechia | — | 979 | 1 in 11K | 979 | — | — |
| PL Poland | — | 770 | 1 in 50K | 438 | — | — |
| UY Uruguay | — | 593 | 1 in 5.7K | 593 | — | — |
| BF Burkina Faso | #243 | — | — | — | Mayer | 2 |
39,555 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; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); MVČR — living population register 2017; INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (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).
Evidence
(measured from records)1 register or reference work attests this spelling, across 0 countries.
Reference works 1
- 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 Mäyer mean, and where does it come from?
- status name for a mayor. Middle English, Old French mair(e) (from Latin maior ‘greater’, ‘superior’; compare Mayor). Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names and Dizionario dei cognomi italiani and 4 other sources.
- In which country does Mäyer have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 40 thousand people named Mäyer, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled mayer.
- Where is Mäyer most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Mäyer is densest in Switzerland — about 1 in 3.5 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Mäyer?
- In the United States, the national register counted 39,555 people named Mäyer in 2010, about 1 in 8.4 thousand residents.
- How common is Mäyer compared with other names?
- In Burkina Faso, Mäyer is the 243rd most common surname of 4,677 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Mäyer?
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/m%C3%A4yerThe 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, “Mäyer” — the 243rd most common surname in Burkina Faso. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.