Shériff
given name · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Shériff is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Nigeria than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From Middle English shirreve, from Old English sċīrġerēfa, corresponding to shire + reeve.
- NGNigeria≈1 in 9.1K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 42K
- USUnited States1 in 71K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Nigeria (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 331 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 790 (inferred from the name graph)
≈23,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Sierra Leone, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Sheriff in US United States, NG Nigeria, GB United Kingdom and 2 more.
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)
- Middle Englishshirreve(measured from records)
- Old Englishsċīrġerēfa(measured from records)
From Middle English shirreve, from Old English sċīrġerēfa, corresponding to shire + reeve. There is no etymological connection to Sharif (شَرِيف (šarīf)), an Arabic title of honour that has cognates in other languages including Hindi, Urdu, Portuguese, etc.
Sources 5
- A dictionary of surnames
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- The Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
- Wiktionary
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 25 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Shériff 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NG Nigeria | ≈23,000 est. | ≈1 in 9.1K | — | Sheriff | 91 |
| SL Sierra Leone | ≈8,400 est. | ≈1 in 790 | 33 | — | 20 |
| US United States | 4,657 | 1 in 71K | 4.8K | Sheriff | 331 |
| LK Sri Lanka | ≈2,100 est. | ≈1 in 11K | — | Sheriff | 31 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 42K | 1.4K | Sheriff | 157 |
| AE United Arab Emirates | ≈290 est. | ≈1 in 34K | — | Sheriff | 47 |
| GY Guyana | 159 | 1 in 4.7K | 159 | — | 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; NEC/ECSL — 2018 Local Council, Chairperson and Mayor nominated candidates. 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).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Alexander Sheriffb. 1816GBBritish politician
- Paul Sheriffb. 1903GBart director (1903-1960)
- Dermot Sheriffb. 1920IEIrish basketball player (1920–1993)
- Paddy Sheriffb. 1926IEIrish basketball player
- Stan Sheriffb. 1932USAmerican football player and coach, college athletics administrator (1932-1993)
- Noam Sheriffb. 1935ILIsraeli composer (1935–2018)
- Abdul Sheriffb. 1939TZTanzanian academic and museum director
- Tamer Hosnyb. 1977EGnot in their usual nameEgyptian singer, actor, composer, director and songwriter
- Justin Sherriffb. 1979IEnot in their usual nameIrish field hockey player
- Estrella López Sheriffb. 1992ESSpanish judoka
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)
No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Shériff mean, and where does it come from?
- From Middle English shirreve, from Old English sċīrġerēfa, corresponding to shire + reeve. Recorded by A dictionary of surnames and The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and 3 other sources.
- Is Shériff a male or female name?
- Shériff is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- In which country does Shériff have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 23 thousand people named Shériff in Nigeria, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sheriff.
- How common is the name Shériff?
- In the United States, the national register counted 4,657 people named Shériff in 2010, about 1 in 71 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Shériff?
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/sh%C3%A9riffThe 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, “Shériff”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.