Rutherford

loc · Latin script

Meaning: Person from Rutherford, Borders, meaning ‘cattle ford’

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

Rutherford is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States
  • AUAustralia
  • CACanada

Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (inferred from the name graph)

no count published

Sources
447 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Person from Rutherford, Borders, meaning ‘cattle ford’.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Rutherford counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Where Rutherford is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—28KRutherford447
AU Australia——Rutherford167
CA Canada——Rutherford195
GB United Kingdom—9.5KRutherford223
RU Russia——Rutherford17
GY Guyana—216—4

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; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)

Rutherford is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish name5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Mexico, United States, Portugal

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Ruthĕrford

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Ruther-Ford

  • Russian surname26 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Russia, United States

    Also written Retherford, Резерфорд, Разерфорд, Рутерфорд, Rezerford

46 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

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)

Rutherford is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, Habitational surname from Rutherford in Maxton, Roxburghshire, from Old English hrythera ford ‘cattle ford’. First later 11th century.

    as a nameScottish Surnames

  • In English, from Rutherford, Roxburghshire/North Riding of Yorkshire; first attested William de Rwthirford a1200 Black

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • In English, An obsolete unit of radioactivity (symbol: rd), defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one million nuclei decay per second.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In English, borough, NJ; pers. name

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  • In Romanian, RUTHERFORD, rutherforzi, s. m. (Fiz.) Unitate de măsură pentru radioactivitate egală cu un milion de dezintegrări pe secundă emise de un element radioactiv. [Pr.: rádărford. - Abr.: Rd].

    as a wordDEX online (dexonline.ro) - DEX '96 / DEX '98 definitions with etymology

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)

17001800190020002100Daniel Rutherford, b. 1749Rutherford B. Hayes, b. 1822Joseph Franklin Rutherford, b. 1869Ernest Rutherford, b. 1871Margaret Rutherford, b. 1892Ann Rutherford, b. 1917Mike Rutherford, b. 1950Layne Staley, b. 1967Greg Rutherford, b. 1986Gayle, b. 2004

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 37 sources across 21 countries.

Official registers attesting Rutherford
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201028K#1,250
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200028K#1,167
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202027K#1,290
GB United KingdomSurnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register)20029.5K#811
GY GuyanaGuyana — Official List of Electors July 20252025216#410
GB United KingdomScottish Surnames (Ross, 1994)———
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 5

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • 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 Rutherford mean, and where does it come from?
Person from Rutherford, Borders, meaning ‘cattle ford’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does Rutherford have the most bearers?
Rutherford is most frequently recorded in the United States, where it is most often spelled rutherford.

What do you want to know about Rutherford?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

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

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, “Rutherford”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Rutherford parses inside a full name →