Kunz
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: From the medieval German male personal name Chunizo, from Old High German kuoni ‘brave’ or chunni ‘people, race’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈkənz/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kunz is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country. In Switzerland it is the 23rd most common surname.
- CHSwitzerland1 in 884(measured from records)
- DEGermany≈1 in 3.1K
- USUnited States1 in 33K
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.
- Germany (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 336 (measured from records)
- 1 in 884 (inferred from the name graph)
≈26,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Switzerland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
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 the medieval German male personal name Chunizo, from Old High German kuoni ‘brave’ or chunni ‘people, race’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
How Kunz is read(measured from records)
Kunz is one spelling over 4 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.
- English52%
From the medieval German male personal name Chunizo, from Old High German kuoni ‘brave’ or chunni ‘people, race’.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
- German28%
Bearer count 13,409. Surname plate on apocope and e-antritt; shows final -e loss and related vowel variants, with the base form around mhd. Kuonz.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus
Kurzform zu Konrad; hier mit Nebentonvokalismus, Apokope und anlautendem -e belegt; Bearer counts and local forms are listed on the page.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus
a diminutive of the male given name Konrad
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Patronym zu Konrad aus Kurzform + -z(e); Konsonantenvariation z/tz, z-Formen im Süden konzentriert. 11696+1491 Belege.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 2: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen II, Konsonantismus
häufiger patronymischer Familienname aus germ. Rufnamen mit -z-Suffix; im Vergleichskorpus der Karte genannt.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus
- Spanish5.5%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Kunz in Spanish.
- Portuguese5.2%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Kunz in Portuguese.
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 in the world(measured from records)
Kunz 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DE Germany | #154 | ≈26,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.1K | listed | Kunz | 179 |
| US United States | — | 9,953 | 1 in 33K | 10K | Kunz | 336 |
| CH Switzerland | #23 | 9,512 | 1 in 884 | 9.5K | Kunz | 113 |
| BR Brazil | — | 3,734 | 1 in 57K | 3.7K | — | 3 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈1,400 est. | ≈1 in 198K | — | Kunz | 16 |
| AT Austria | #598 | ≈760 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Kunz | 65 |
| CZ Czechia | — | 461 | 1 in 23K | 461 | — | — |
| DK Denmark | — | 205 | 1 in 29K | 205 | — | — |
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; the dfa-band-1 register; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); MVČR — living population register 2017; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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)
- George Frederick Kunzb. 1856USAmerican mineralogist (1856-1932)
- Erich Kunzb. 1909ATAustrian opera singer (1909–1995)
- Helmut Kunzb. 1910DESS officer (1910–1976)
- Gerhard Kunzb. 1942DEGerman politician
- Joachim Kunzb. 1959DEGerman weightlifter
- Simon Kunzb. 1962GBBritish actor
- Cecilia Kunzb. 1971DEGerman actress
- Florian Kunzb. 1972DEfield hockey player
- Eduard Kunzb. 1980RURussian musician
- Leonard Kunzb. 1992DEGerman 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)
Attested in 39 sources across 23 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 10K | #3,578 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 9.8K | #3,563 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 9.5K | #3,436 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 9.5K | #34 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 3.7K | #2,853 |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 461 | #3,320 |
| CZ Czechia | KdeJsme.cz — četnost jmen a příjmení (MVČR population register front-end) | — | 461 | #3,071 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 205 | #2,441 |
| DE Germany | Deutscher Familiennamenatlas Band 1 | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 8
- 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
- Hoffman, Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings (2nd ed., 2012)
- Cognomix.it (Nomix s.r.l.) — Italian surname origin dictionary
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 Kunz mean, and where does it come from?
- From the medieval German male personal name Chunizo, from Old High German kuoni ‘brave’ or chunni ‘people, race’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Kunz?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈkənz/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Kunz have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 26 thousand people named Kunz in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kunz.
- Where is Kunz most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Kunz is densest in Switzerland — about 1 in 884 people — even though Germany holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Kunz?
- In the United States, the national register counted 9,953 people named Kunz in 2010, about 1 in 33 thousand residents.
- How common is Kunz compared with other names?
- In Germany, Kunz is the 154th most common surname of 765,306 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kunz?
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/kunzThe 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, “Kunz” — the 154th most common surname in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.