Furness
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Person from Furness, a district in Cumbria, from a place-name meaning ‘headland opposite buttock island’ (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 8 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Furness is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United Kingdom than in any other country.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 29K(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 31K
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 44Kfew records
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.
- United Kingdom (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 237 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 29K (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,400 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
United Kingdom, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Person from Furness, a district in Cumbria, from a place-name meaning ‘headland opposite buttock island’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Furness is found
(measured from records)Furness 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | ≈2,400 est. | ≈1 in 29K | listed | Furness | 168 |
| US United States | 2,198 | 1 in 151K | 2.2K | Furness | 237 |
| AU Australia | ≈880 est. | ≈1 in 31K | — | Furness | 116 |
| CA Canada | ≈370 est. | ≈1 in 111K | — | Furness | 82 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈360 est. | ≈1 in 177K | — | Furness | 21 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈120 est. | ≈1 in 44K | — | Furness | 50 |
| IE Ireland | ≈96 est. | ≈1 in 56K | — | Furness | 13 |
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 hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 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)Furness 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.
In English, coast of Cumb. (formerly in Lancs.), earlier Fubarnes, so called from the gen. case (Fu6ar) of ON Fu5 ‘Rump’, the name of the peninsula, formerly of an island opposite the southern part of this district + ON nes headland, nose. Vars.: Furniss, Furnass.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A peninsula in south-west Cumbria, England, historically part of Lancashire.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Betty, US journalist
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper 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)- Betty Furnessb. 1916USAmerican actress, consumer advocate and current affairs commentator (1916-1994)
- Deborra-Lee Furnessb. 1955AUAustralian actress
- Evan Furnessb. 1998FRFrench tennis player
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)16 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 8 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Furness mean, and where does it come from?
- Person from Furness, a district in Cumbria, from a place-name meaning ‘headland opposite buttock island’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Furness?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.4 thousand people named Furness in the United Kingdom, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled furness. After it come United States, Australia, Canada and South Africa; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Furness?
- In the United States, the national register counted 2,198 people named Furness in 2010, about 1 in 151 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Furness?
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/furnessThe 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, “Furness”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.