Besant

surname · Latin script

Meaning, in English: ‘Maker of coins’, or from a medieval nickname for a wealthy person, from Middle English besant, a type of gold coin

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

/bɛsənt/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Besant is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States
  • AUAustralia
  • GBUnited Kingdom

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)

‘Maker of coins’, or from a medieval nickname for a wealthy person, from Middle English besant, a type of gold coin.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 5 languages in the etymology graph.

How Besant is read(measured from records)

Besant is one spelling over 3 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.

  • English78%

    ‘Maker of coins’, or from a medieval nickname for a wealthy person, from Middle English besant, a type of gold coin.

    as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

    from ME besant/besand, OFr besan, Lat byzantius (a gold coin from Byzantium); first attested Lefwin besant 1147–68 Bart (Lo)

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

    Lefwin besant 1147–68 Bart (Lo); Robert Besant 1186–92 Clerkenwell (Lo), 1195 P (Lo). ME besant, besand, OFr besan, pl. besanz, Lat byzantius (nummus), a gold coin first minted at Byzantium (c1200 NED). Bizantia is first recorded in MLWL in 1187. cf. unam bisanciam c1179 Bart. Lefwin Besant was a moneyer (1168 P).

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

    (via OF from L (nummus) byzantius, so called because it was first minted at Byzantium). The surname arose as a metonymic occupational name for a coiner or else a nick¬ name for a man rich in cash. A certain Lefwin Besant is recorded in London in 1168 as a moneyer. Vars.: Bessant. Bessent, Bez(z)ant.

    as a nameA dictionary of surnames

  • German6.4%

    No dictionary in our sources glosses Besant in German.

  • French5.5%

    bezant (coin)

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

    Le besant était, au Moyen Âge, une monnaie d’or ou d’argent originaire de Byzance (ou Constantinople puis Istanbul). Elle se répandit dans toute l’Europe médiévale à la faveur des croisades. Le mot fut employé, par extension, pour désigner un disque aplati utilisé dans l’ornementation de l’art roman. On le retrouve, avec le même sens, en héraldique. Voir Byzantinisme .

    as a name2500 noms propres devenus communs : dictionnaire étymologique (éponymes, antonomases et hypallages)

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)

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).

Notable people with this name(measured from records)

18001850190019502000W. H. Besant, b. 1828Walter Besant, b. 1836Annie Besant, b. 1847Derek Michael Besant, b. 1950Henry Besant, b. 1972

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)

FormalDear Colleague,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 10 sources across 4 countries.

Official registers attesting Besant
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020201#96,965
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010196#93,513
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000186#91,801
IN IndiaInstate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls—4#27,184
BE BelgiumFamilienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register)20083#130,757
GB United KingdomA Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988)———
GB United KingdomA Dictionary of English Surnames (Reaney & Wilson, 1991)———
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 2

  • 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 Besant mean, and where does it come from?
‘Maker of coins’, or from a medieval nickname for a wealthy person, from Middle English besant, a type of gold coin. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Besant?
A machine transcription gives /bɛsənt/ (IPA) for English.
In which country does Besant have the most bearers?
Besant is most frequently recorded in the United States.

What do you want to know about Besant?

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

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, “Besant”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Besant parses inside a full name →