Beaufort

loc · Latin script

Meaning: Person from Beaufort, a place-name in northern France meaning 'beautiful fortress'

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Beaufort is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in Malaysia.

rarermore common
  • MYMalaysia
  • ZASouth Africa
  • FRFrance

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.

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Person from Beaufort, a place-name in northern France meaning 'beautiful fortress'.

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)

Beaufort 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 various places in France, for example in the departe¬ ments of Nord, Somme, and Pas-de-Calais, so called from OF beu, bel fair, lovely (see Beau) + fort fortress, strong¬ hold (see Fort i). Var.: Belfort.

    as a nameA dictionary of surnames

  • In French, De (Le) Beaufort, nom de plusieurs localités en France.

    as a nameDictionnaire des noms de famille du Canada français. Anthroponymie et généalogie. 2e édition

  • In English, scale of wind force

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  • In English, county, city, SC

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  • In English, Sea, Arctic

    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)

1200140016001800John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, b. 1373Henry Beaufort, b. 1375Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, b. 1377Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, b. 1379John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset, b. 1404Joan Beaufort, b. 1404Edmund Beaufort, 2nd Duke of Somerset, b. 1406Henry Beaufort, 3rd Duke of Somerset, b. 1436Margaret Beaufort, b. 1443Francis Beaufort, b. 1774

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).

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 20 sources across 12 countries.

Official registers attesting Beaufort
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020715#34,185
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010706#32,562
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000567#37,043
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1961377—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1951355—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1971319—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1941319—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1991288—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1981285—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1931251—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1921243—
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1901242—

Reference works 3

  • 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 Beaufort mean, and where does it come from?
Person from Beaufort, a place-name in northern France meaning 'beautiful fortress'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does Beaufort have the most bearers?
Beaufort is most frequently recorded in Malaysia.

What do you want to know about Beaufort?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/beaufort

The 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, “Beaufort”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Beaufort parses inside a full name →