Gruen
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from Middle High German gruene ‘green’, ‘fresh’, ‘raw’, hence a nickname for someone who habitually dressed in green, a topographic name for someone who lived in a green and leafy place, or a habitati
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 7 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Gruen is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 271K(measured from records)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 310Kfew records
- CACanada≈1 in 320Kfew records
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Gruen itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. 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
- 230 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 146K (inferred from the name graph)
1,227 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Denmark, 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)from Middle High German gruene ‘green’, ‘fresh’, ‘raw’, hence a nickname for someone who habitually dressed in green, a topographic name for someone who lived in a green and leafy place, or a habitational name for someone from a place named with this word, such as Gruna, Grunau in Silesia.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Gruen 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 | 1,227 | 1 in 271K | 1.4K | Gruen | 230 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈170 est. | ≈1 in 378K | — | Gruen | 8 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈140 est. | ≈1 in 502K | — | Gruen | 24 |
| CA Canada | ≈130 est. | ≈1 in 322K | — | Gruen | 29 |
| PH Philippines | ≈110 est. | ≈1 in 1M | — | Gruen | 5 |
| AU Australia | ≈87 est. | ≈1 in 314K | — | Gruen | 33 |
| DK Denmark | ≈41 est. | ≈1 in 146K | — | Gruen | 4 |
| SG Singapore | ≈26 est. | ≈1 in 229K | — | Gruen | 3 |
1,227 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020. 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)Gruen is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
ornamental name from German griin ‘green’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In Danish, definite singular of gru
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)- James Gruenb. 1894USAmerican screenwriter (1894–1967)
- Victor Gruenb. 1903ATAustrian architect (1903-1980)
- Dieter Gruenb. 1922USAmerican chemist
- Arno Gruenb. 1923CHpsychologist (1923-2015)
- John Gruenb. 1926USAmerican art critic, art historian, author, photographer, and composer (1926-2016)
- Erich S. Gruenb. 1935ATAmerican historian
- Armin Grünb. 1944DEnot in their usual nameprofessor
- Bob Gruenb. 1945USAmerican photographer
- Lori Gruenb. 1962USProfessor and scholar noted especially for her pioneering work in animal ethics
- Sara Gruenb. 1969CACanadian and American writer
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)13 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.4K | #19,592 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.3K | #19,672 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.2K | #21,348 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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 Gruen mean, and where does it come from?
- from Middle High German gruene ‘green’, ‘fresh’, ‘raw’, hence a nickname for someone who habitually dressed in green, a topographic name for someone who lived in a green and leafy place, or a habitati… Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Gruen have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 1.2 thousand people named Gruen, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled gruen.
- How common is the name Gruen?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,227 people named Gruen in 2010, about 1 in 271 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Gruen?
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/gruenThe 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, “Gruen”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.