Geyer
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: comparative form of gey: more gey
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 19 countries · latest register: BFS, 2024
Geyer is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 14K(inferred from the name graph)
- CHSwitzerland1 in 26K
- IEIreland≈1 in 28Kfew records
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 353 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 14K (inferred from the name graph)
7,962 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
South Africa, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)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)nickname for a greedy or rapacious person, from Middle High and Middle Low German glr(e) ‘large bird of prey’, ‘vulture’. Some early examples may be a habitational name from houses bearing the sign of a bird of prey or from a place named Geyer near Zwickau, in Saxony, which is probably ultimately from the same word.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
How Geyer is read
(measured from records)Geyer is one spelling over 3 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.
- English65%
comparative form of gey: more gey
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- German19%
nickname for a greedy or rapacious person, from Middle High and Middle Low German glr(e) ‘large bird of prey’, ‘vulture’. Some early examples may be a habitational name from houses bearing the sign of a bird of prey or from a place named Geyer near Zwickau, in Saxony, which is probably ultimately from the same word.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
Übername zu mhd./mnd. gîr(e) 'Geier' oder zu gîr 'gierig'; Stammvokal auf mhd./mnd. î. 5278 Belege. Zeigt die Konkurrenz der i-Langvokale in der Namengeographie.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus
Herkunftsname zu Geyer im Erzgebirge oder Hausname; die Karte zeigt die ey/ei-Vokalvariante gegenüber Geier. 5278 Belege.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus
- French6.0%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Geyer in French.
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 the surname Geyer is found
(measured from records)Geyer 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 7,962 | 1 in 42K | 8K | Geyer | 353 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈4,400 est. | ≈1 in 14K | — | Geyer | 62 |
| FR France | ≈1,700 est. | ≈1 in 40K | 187 | — | 3 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈1,300 est. | ≈1 in 53K | — | Geyer | 77 |
| CA Canada | ≈860 est. | ≈1 in 48K | — | Geyer | 58 |
| AU Australia | ≈760 est. | ≈1 in 36K | — | Geyer | 92 |
| CH Switzerland | 320 | 1 in 26K | 320 | Geyer | 9 |
| IE Ireland | ≈190 est. | ≈1 in 28K | — | Geyer | 2 |
7,962 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000). 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)- Florian Geyerb. 1490DEGerman knight,diplomat and peasant leader in the German Peasants' War
- Enrique Bolañosb. 1928NInot in their usual namePresident of Nicaragua from 2002 to 2007
- Dean Geyerb. 1986ZAAustralian singer-songwriter and actor
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)30 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 19 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the name Geyer come from?
- nickname for a greedy or rapacious person, from Middle High and Middle Low German glr(e) ‘large bird of prey’, ‘vulture’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- What does the name Geyer mean?
- In English, comparative form of gey: more gey
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Geyer?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 8.0 thousand people named Geyer, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled geyer. After it come South Africa, France, United Kingdom and Canada; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Geyer?
- In the United States, the national register counted 7,962 people named Geyer in 2010, about 1 in 42 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Geyer?
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/geyerThe 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, “Geyer”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.