Notman
surname · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Notman is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom. Recorded meaning: Respelling of German Nothmann, from a short form of a Germanic personal name formed with a cognate of Old High German not ‘distress’, ‘force’ + man ‘man’.
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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)
Respelling of German Nothmann, from a short form of a Germanic personal name formed with a cognate of Old High German not ‘distress’, ‘force’ + man ‘man’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Notman counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
| Country | Most common spelling | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | — | 601 | — |
| US United States | — | 293 | — |
| BE Belgium | — | 5 | — |
| EE Estonia | — | listed | — |
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: Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); the ee-siseministeerium-registry register. 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)
Notman 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.
nickname for a poor man, from German Not ‘need’, ‘want’ + Mann ‘man’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
from Middle Low German note ‘companion’ + man ‘man’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
probably an occupational name for a dealer in nuts, from Middle English not(e), nut + man, although Black expresses reservations about this derivation, and it may perhaps be an occupational name for the ‘servant (Middle English man) of someone called Nott’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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)
- William Notmanb. 1805CACanadian politician (1805-1865)
- William Notmanb. 1809Scottish architect
- John Notmanb. 1810USAmerican architect
- William Notmanb. 1826CAScottish-Canadian photographer and businessman (1826–1891)
- John Sloan Notmanb. 1830CACanadian photographer
- James Notmanb. 1849CACanadian photographer (1849–1932)
- William McFarlane Notmanb. 1857CACanadian photographer (1857-1913)
- John Robertson Notmanb. 1927Scottish architect
- Alex Notmanb. 1979GBScottish footballer (born 1979)
- Geoffrey NotmanNZNew Zealand artist
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 11 sources across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EE Estonia | Siseministeerium — population register name list 2023 | 2023 | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Notman mean, and where does it come from?
- Respelling of German Nothmann, from a short form of a Germanic personal name formed with a cognate of Old High German not ‘distress’, ‘force’ + man ‘man’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Notman have the most bearers?
- Notman is most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
What do you want to know about Notman?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/notmanThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use; a free API key gives 1,000 requests a day, and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Notman”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.