Quartermain
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from a medieval nickname for a very dextrous person, or for someone who habitually wore gloves, from Old French quatremains 'four hands' (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 3 countries · latest register: dane.gov.pl, 2026
Quartermain is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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 a medieval nickname for a very dextrous person, or for someone who habitually wore gloves, from Old French quatremains 'four hands'.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Quartermain counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
| Country | Most common spelling | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | — | 242 | — |
| PL Poland | — | 2 | — |
| US United States | — | listed | — |
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: Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); the us-wru-surnames-voterfile 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)Quartermain 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, from AFr quatremayns, quatremans ‘four hands’, i.e. mail-fisted; first attested Herbert Quatremains, Robertus Quatuormanus 1187 Merton (O)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, from English quartermain; surname-derived
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
In English, ‘four hands’, perhaps denoting a person who was in the habit of w’earing heavy gloves, esp. of mail, or one who worked so fast or was so dextrous that he seemed to have four hands, from OF quatre four (L quattuor) + main hand (L manus). (mod. Eng. quaint). Dim.; Eng.; Quantrill. Augs.: Fr.: Cointat, Coindat.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
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)- Pat Quartermainb. 1937GBEnglish footballer (1937-2023)
- Meredith Quartermainb. 1950CACanadian writer
- Stephen Quartermainb. 1962AUAustralian rules footballer
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)7 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 3 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Quartermain mean, and where does it come from?
- from a medieval nickname for a very dextrous person, or for someone who habitually wore gloves, from Old French quatremains 'four hands'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Quartermain have the most bearers?
- Quartermain is most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
What do you want to know about Quartermain?
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/quartermainThe 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, “Quartermain” — ranked 18859th in the United Kingdom (Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register)). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.