Geller
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) person from Geldern/Gelderland, probably from a word meaning 'marsh'; (ii) town crier; (iii) medieval Jewish nickname for a red-haired person; (iv) variant of Heller
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 19 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
/ɡɛlɚ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Geller is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- DEGermany≈1 in 35K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 49K
- CACanada≈1 in 53K
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 States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 371 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 16K (inferred from the name graph)
6,810 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Israel, 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)(i) person from Geldern/Gelderland, probably from a word meaning 'marsh'; (ii) town crier; (iii) medieval Jewish nickname for a red-haired person; (iv) variant of Heller.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world
(measured from records)Geller 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 | 6,810 | 1 in 49K | 6.8K | Geller | 371 |
| DE Germany | ≈2,300 est. | ≈1 in 35K | — | Geller | 117 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈990 est. | ≈1 in 67K | — | Geller | 92 |
| BR Brazil | 881 | 1 in 240K | 881 | — | 4 |
| CA Canada | ≈710 est. | ≈1 in 53K | — | Geller | 95 |
| IL Israel | ≈530 est. | ≈1 in 16K | — | Geller | 44 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈140 est. | ≈1 in 35K | — | Geller | 7 |
6,810 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; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). 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)Geller is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
nickname for a man with red hair, from the strong form of Yiddish gel ‘redheaded’ (Middle High German gel ‘yellow’). There has been considerable confusion with German gelb ‘yellow’, since the meaning change from ‘yellow’ to ‘red’ took place only in Yiddish and only with reference to people’s complexion or hair coloring.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
occupational name for a town crier. Middle High German gellcere (from gellen ‘to shout or yell’).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
habitational name from the North German town of Geldem or from the Dutch province of Gelderland, earlier Geler and Gelre. Both places get their names from what may be an ancient element descriptive of marshland.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
variant of Heller 3, originating under Russian influence, since Russian has no h and alters h in borrowed words to g.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In German, meist Herkunftsname zu Geldern (Niederrhein); ggf. Übername zu mhd./mnd. gellen „laut tönen, schreien“. 942 Belege.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 5: Familiennamen nach Beruf und persönlichen Merkmalen
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)- Todros Gellerb. 1889USAmerican artist (1889-1949)
- Andrew Gellerb. 1924USAmerican architect (1924-2011)
- Efim Gellerb. 1925RUSoviet chess player (1925–1998)
- Bruce Gellerb. 1930USAmerican television producer and writer (1930–1978)
- Uri Gellerb. 1946ILIsraeli illusionist
- Margaret Gellerb. 1947USAmerican astronomer
- Stephen Gellerb. 1953USAmerican screenwriter
- Pamela Gellerb. 1958USAmerican far-right activist, blogger, commentator and conspiracy theorist
- Lior Gellerb. 1982USfilm director
- Axel Gellerb. 1999ARArgentine tennis player (1999-)
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 19 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 6.8K | #5,139 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 6.3K | #5,086 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 6.1K | #5,484 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 881 | #10,381 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 7
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
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 Geller mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) person from Geldern/Gelderland, probably from a word meaning 'marsh'; (ii) town crier; (iii) medieval Jewish nickname for a red-haired person; (iv) variant of Heller. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Geller?
- A machine transcription gives /ɡɛlɚ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Geller have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 6.8 thousand people named Geller, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled geller.
- How common is the name Geller?
- In the United States, the national register counted 6,810 people named Geller in 2010, about 1 in 49 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Geller?
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/gellerThe 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, “Geller”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.