Bass
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) fish catcher/seller or nickname for someone thought to resemble a fish; (ii) nickname for a short person; (iii) person from Bass, Aberdeenshire; (iv) maker or player of bass viols
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/bæs/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Bass is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Türkiye than in any other country, where it is the 66th most common surname.
- USUnited States1 in 5.8K(measured from records)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 7K
- EGEgypt≈1 in 21K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Bass itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Türkiye (inferred from the name graph)
- #998 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 498 (measured from records)
- 1 in 5.8K (inferred from the name graph)
≈88,000 named Baş, est.
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Bas in PH Philippines, UY Uruguay and Baş in TR Türkiye.
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) fish catcher/seller or nickname for someone thought to resemble a fish; (ii) nickname for a short person; (iii) person from Bass, Aberdeenshire; (iv) maker or player of bass viols
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 16 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Bass 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TR Türkiye | #66 | ≈88,000 est. | ≈1 in 927 | — | Baş | 87 |
| US United States | #486 | 57,044 | 1 in 5.8K | 57K | Bass | 498 |
| GB United Kingdom | #714 | ≈9,400 est. | ≈1 in 7K | listed | Bass | 210 |
| PH Philippines | — | ≈6,500 est. | ≈1 in 17K | — | Bas | 37 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈4,900 est. | ≈1 in 21K | — | Bass | 28 |
| UY Uruguay | #653 | 865as Bas | 1 in 3.9K | 865 | Bas | 23 |
| IE Ireland | #672 | ≈760 est. | ≈1 in 6.8K | — | Bass | 44 |
| GY Guyana | — | 450as Bess | 1 in 1.7K | 450 | — | 3 |
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 reaney-english-surnames-1991 register; INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)
Bass 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, from OFr bas, basse 'low, of small height'; first attested Aelizia Bass 1180 P (Wa)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, (i) Aelizia Bass’ 1180 P (Wa); Dauid le Bas 1205 P (Gl); Geoffrey Base 1274 RH (L). OFr bas, basse, ME bass 1393, bace c1440, base 1425 ‘low, of small height’. A man with short legs. cf. BASSETT. (ii) Osbert Bars 1207 P (Gl); Richard le Bars 1327 SRSx. OE bærs, now bass, a fish; cf. Bace, fysche c1440 PromptParv.
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Of sound, a voice or an instrument, low in pitch or frequency.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Saul, graphic designer, filmmaker;
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, tdmkfor English ale; tdmkfor
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
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)
- George Bassb. 1771GBBritish explorer (1771–1803)
- Saul Bassb. 1920USAmerican graphic designer and filmmaker (1920–1996)
- Jules Bassb. 1935USAmerican composer and filmmaker (1935–2022)
- Ronald Bassb. 1942USAmerican writer and producer
- Laila Morseb. 1945GBnot in their usual nameEnglish actress (born 1945)
- Karen Bassb. 1953USAmerican politician and 43rd Mayor of Los Angeles
- Tommy Leeb. 1962GRnot in their usual nameAmerican drummer (born 1962)
- Ben Bassb. 1968USAmerican-Canadian actor
- Lance Bassb. 1979USAmerican singer, dancer, actor, and film and television producer
- Jon Bassb. 1989USAmerican 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 45 sources across 25 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 57K | #589 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 55K | #601 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 54K | #559 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of English Surnames (Reaney & Wilson, 1991) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- 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
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
- How do you pronounce Bass?
- A machine transcription gives /bæs/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Bass mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) fish catcher/seller or nickname for someone thought to resemble a fish; (ii) nickname for a short person; (iii) person from Bass, Aberdeenshire; (iv) maker or player of bass viols Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- What are other forms of the name Bass?
- In the etymology graph, Barsch is a form of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Bass have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 88 thousand people named Baş in Türkiye, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Bass most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Bass is densest in the United States — about 1 in 5.8 thousand people — even though Türkiye holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Bass?
- In the United States, the national register counted 57,044 people named Bass in 2010, about 1 in 5.8 thousand residents.
- How common is Bass compared with other names?
- In Türkiye, Bass is the 66th most common surname of 619,652 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Bass?
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/bassThe 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, “Bass” — the 66th most common surname in Türkiye. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.