Petter
given name · Latin script
Meaning, in English: from OFr peter ‘to break wind’; first attested John le Petour 1299 LLB B
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/pətːɛr/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Petter is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Sweden than in any other country. In Norway it is the 34th most common given name.
- NONorway1 in 540(measured from records)
- SESweden1 in 983
- BJBenin≈1 in 2.8K
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.
- Sweden (measured from records)
- Sources
- 148 (measured from records)
- 1 in 540 (inferred from the name graph)
10,379 people
Highest-authority source
Norway
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from OFr peter ‘to break wind’; first attested John le Petour 1299 LLB B
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested across 16 languages in the etymology graph.
How Petter is read(measured from records)
Petter is one spelling over 5 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.
- Norwegian36%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Petter in Norwegian.
- Spanish13%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Petter in Spanish.
- Swedish11%
Petter är en nordisk form av → Petrus. Formen blev vanlig först på 1700-talet i Sverige. I den finlandssvenska almanackan 29 juni.
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
- English11%
from OFr peter ‘to break wind’; first attested John le Petour 1299 LLB B
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
- Portuguese6.1%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Petter 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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)
Petter 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.
10,379 people counted by Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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: SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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)
- Petter Dassb. 1647NONorwegian priest and poet
- Petter Adolf Karstenb. 1834FIFinnish mycologist (1834-1917)
- Hans Petter Molandb. 1955NONorwegian film director and screenwriter (born 1955)
- Petter Bergb. 1956NONorwegian politician
- Petter Næssb. 1960NONorwegian director
- Jonas Berggrenb. 1967SEnot in their usual nameSwedish songwriter and guitarist
- Petter Solbergb. 1974NONorwegian rally and rallycross driver
- Petter Hanssonb. 1976SESwedish footballer
- Måns Zelmerlöwb. 1986SEnot in their usual nameSwedish singer and television presenter (born 1986)
- Petter Northug Jr.b. 1986NONorwegian cross-country skier
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)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 58 sources across 28 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 30 | #37,363 |
Reference works 6
- 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 given-name 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
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 Petter mean, and where does it come from?
- from OFr peter ‘to break wind’; first attested John le Petour 1299 LLB B Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- What are other forms of the name Petter?
- In the etymology graph, Peter, Pedro and Pierre are forms of the same name in other languages; Pehr is a recorded short or pet form.
- How do you pronounce Petter?
- A machine transcription gives /pətːɛr/ (IPA) for Norwegian.
- Is Petter a male or female name?
- Petter is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- In which country does Petter have the most bearers?
- In Sweden, the national register counted about 10 thousand people named Petter, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled petter.
- Where is Petter most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Petter is densest in Norway — about 1 in 540 people — even though Sweden holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Petter?
- In Sweden, the national register counted 10,379 people named Petter, about 1 in 983 residents.
- How common is Petter compared with other names?
- In Sweden, Petter is the 238th most common given name of 45,482 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Petter?
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/petterThe 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, “Petter” — the 238th most common given name in Sweden. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.