Balfour
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Person from Balfour’, the name of several places in eastern Scotland; literally ‘homestead in the pasture’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈbæɫfɔɹ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Balfour is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- AUAustralia
- CACanada
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘Person from Balfour’, the name of several places in eastern Scotland; literally ‘homestead in the pasture’.
Sources 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)
Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
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)
Balfour 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.
In English, Place-name surname from Fife: Gaelic baile ‘farm, village’ + phúir ‘of the pasture’; surname de Balfure attested 1304.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, from the barony of Balfour, Fife; first attested John de Balfure 1304 Black
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Scottish Gaelic; from the village by the pasture
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
A location name from Fife, Gaelic baile, ‘farm’ or ‘village’, and phúir, ‘of the pasture’, and originally spoken with accent on the second syllable. The surname de Balfure appears in 1304 and remains a frequent name in Fife. Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) was Prime Minister, 1902–05.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, John, William de Balfure 1304, 1331–5 Black; Michael de Balfoure 1365 ib. From the barony of Balfour(Fife).
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
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)
- John Hutton Balfourb. 1808GBBritish botanist (1808-1884)
- James Maitland Balfourb. 1820GBBritish politician (1820-1856)
- Arthur Balfourb. 1848GBBritish Prime Minister, Conservative politician, and statesman (1848-1930)
- Gerald Balfour, 2nd Earl of Balfourb. 1853GBBritish politician (1853–1945)
- Isaac Bayley Balfourb. 1853GBBritish botanist and academic (1853-1922)
- Robert Balfour, 3rd Earl of Balfourb. 1902GBBritish noble (1902-1968)
- Betty Balfourb. 1903GBBritish actress (1903-1977)
- Eric Balfourb. 1977USAmerican actor and singer
- Jodi Balfourb. 1987ZASouth African actresses
- Penny BalfourUSactress
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 29 sources across 16 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.3K | #13,435 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.2K | #13,289 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.1K | #13,311 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 33 | #59,939 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 33 | #58,864 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 21 | — |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 20 | #42,196 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 10 | #60,931 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 10 | #40,757 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 5 | — |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 5 | #99,657 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 5 | #192,523 |
Reference works 4
- 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)
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 Balfour mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Person from Balfour’, the name of several places in eastern Scotland; literally ‘homestead in the pasture’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Balfour?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈbæɫfɔɹ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Balfour have the most bearers?
- Balfour is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Balfour?
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/balfourThe 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, “Balfour”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.