Forster
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: (i) person who lives in or near a royal forest, or works in one; (ii) scissor-maker; (iii) wood-worker; (iv) Jewish name from German Forst 'forest'
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/fɒɹstɚ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Forster is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country, where it is the 99th most common surname.
- CHSwitzerland1 in 3.1K(measured from records)
- DEGermany≈1 in 3.6K
- ATAustria≈1 in 7.1K
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.
- Germany (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 392 (measured from records)
- 1 in 3.1K (inferred from the name graph)
≈22,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Switzerland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Förster in DE Germany.
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)
(i) person who lives in or near a royal forest, or works in one; (ii) scissor-maker; (iii) wood-worker; (iv) Jewish name from German Forst 'forest'
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
How Forster is read(measured from records)
Forster is one spelling over 2 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English72%
(i) person who lives in or near a royal forest, or works in one; (ii) scissor-maker; (iii) wood-worker; (iv) Jewish name from German Forst 'forest'
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
from FORESTER; also equivalent to FEWSTER or from OFr fustrier 'saddle-tree maker'; first attested John Forster 1315 AssC
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
An occupational or topographic surname originating as an occupation for someone who worked or lived in a forest.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- German13%
Berufsname zu Forster; 6126 Token. Die Karte zeigt die Verteilung der Umlaut- und nicht umgelauteten Vokalvarianten.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus
Berufsname zu Forst; Karte zeigt o/ö-Varianz. 6.126 Träger.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Forster 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DE Germany | #99 | ≈22,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.6K | listed | Förster | 163 |
| US United States | — | 9,116 | 1 in 36K | 9.1K | Forster | 392 |
| GB United Kingdom | #578 | ≈8,300 est. | ≈1 in 8K | listed | Forster | 238 |
| AU Australia | #668 | ≈3,300 est. | ≈1 in 7.6K | — | Forster | 172 |
| CH Switzerland | #177 | 2,699 | 1 in 3.1K | 2.7K | Forster | 67 |
| AT Austria | #311 | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 7.1K | — | Forster | 76 |
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; the dfa-band-1 register; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (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).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Forster is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
Förster = forester, Under Rhine district, Baden.
as a nameThe Origin of Jewish Family Names: Morphology and History
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)
- Johann Reinhold Forsterb. 1729DEGerman naturalist (1729–1798)
- Georg Forsterb. 1754PLGerman naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist, and revolutionary (1754-1794)
- E. M. Forsterb. 1879GBEnglish novelist (1879-1970)
- Albert Forsterb. 1902DEGerman politician (NSDAP), MdR, Gauleiter of the NSDAP and Reich Governor in Danzig (1902–1952)
- Walter Forsterb. 1917BRBrazilian actor
- Heidy Forsterb. 1931CHSwiss German actress (1931–2023)
- Margaret Forsterb. 1938GBBritish writer (1938–2016)
- Robert Forsterb. 1941USAmerican actor (1941–2019)
- Marc Forsterb. 1969DEGerman-Swiss film director (born 1969)
- Fraser Forsterb. 1988GBEnglish association football player (born 1988)
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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 34 sources across 21 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 9.1K | #3,895 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 9K | #3,615 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 8.6K | #3,993 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 2.7K | #308 |
| DE Germany | Deutscher Familiennamenatlas Band 1 | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 6
- 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)
- 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
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 Forster mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) person who lives in or near a royal forest, or works in one; (ii) scissor-maker; (iii) wood-worker; (iv) Jewish name from German Forst 'forest' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Forster?
- A machine transcription gives /fɒɹstɚ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Forster have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 22 thousand people named Forster in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled förster.
- Where is Forster most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Forster is densest in Switzerland — about 1 in 3.1 thousand people — even though Germany holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Forster?
- In the United States, the national register counted 9,116 people named Forster in 2010, about 1 in 36 thousand residents.
- How common is Forster compared with other names?
- In Germany, Forster is the 99th most common surname of 765,306 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Forster?
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/forsterThe 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, “Forster” — the 99th most common surname in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.