Hobbs
surname · Latin script
Meaning: patronymic from the medieval personal name Hobb(e), a short form of Robert (Dictionary of American Family Names)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 20 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Hobbs is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 48,522 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010. Hobbs is also written 홉스 in Korean (Hangul).
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 4.2K(inferred from the name graph)
- IEIreland≈1 in 4.4K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 4.5K
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 Hobbs 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
- 484 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 4.2K (inferred from the name graph)
48,522 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
United Kingdom, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Hobbs in other scripts: Korean (Hangul)
(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)patronymic from the medieval personal name Hobb(e), a short form of Robert. For the altered initial, compare Hick.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Hobbs is found
(measured from records)Hobbs 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 | #621 | 48,522 | 1 in 6.9K | 49K | Hobbs | 484 |
| GB United Kingdom | #407 | ≈17,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.2K | — | Hobbs | 266 |
| CA Canada | #634 | ≈6,600 est. | ≈1 in 6.3K | 1 | Hobbs | 180 |
| AU Australia | #468 | ≈6,100 est. | ≈1 in 4.5K | — | Hobbs | 198 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈2,900 est. | ≈1 in 22K | — | Hobbs | 56 |
| IE Ireland | #469 | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 4.4K | — | Hobbs | 61 |
| SG Singapore | #450 | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 5.1K | — | Hobbs | 30 |
| NZ New Zealand | #464 | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 5K | — | Hobbs | 94 |
48,522 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; Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender. 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)Hobbs 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.
In English, A surname originating as a patronymic.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, ‘son of Hobb’, a pet-form of Robert
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names 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)- Jack Hobbsb. 1882GBEnglish cricketer (1882–1963)
- Helen Hobbsb. 1952USAmerican molecular geneticist
- Katie Hobbsb. 1969USGovernor of Arizona since 2023
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)34 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 20 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the name Hobbs come from?
- patronymic from the medieval personal name Hobb(e), a short form of Robert. For the altered initial, compare Hick. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- What does the name Hobbs mean?
- Recorded meaning: patronymic from the medieval personal name Hobb(e), a short form of Robert.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Hobbs?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 49 thousand people named Hobbs, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled hobbs. After it come United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and South Africa; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Hobbs?
- In the United States, the national register counted 48,522 people named Hobbs in 2010, about 1 in 6.9 thousand residents.
- How common is Hobbs compared with other names?
- In the United States, Hobbs is the 621st most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Hobbs?
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/hobbsThe 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, “Hobbs” — ranked 659th in the United States (Census Bureau, 2010). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.