Birmingham

loc · Latin script

Meaning: from Birmingham, Warwickshire; first attested Peter de Bremingeham 1170 P (St)

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

Birmingham is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.

rarermore common
  • GBUnited Kingdom
  • USUnited States
  • CNChina

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.

United Kingdom (inferred from the name graph)

no count published

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
354 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

BirminghamLatin(measured from records)
ΜπερμιγχαμGreek(measured from records)

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)

from Birmingham, Warwickshire; first attested Peter de Bremingeham 1170 P (St)

Sources 1

  • A Dictionary of English Surnames

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Birmingham counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Where Birmingham is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
GB United Kingdom—listedBirmingham139
US United States—6.6KBirmingham354
CN China——Birmingham2
AU Australia——Birmingham91
RU Russia——Birmingham6

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: the hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 register; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010. 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Birmingham is also recorded as 3 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Birming-Ham

  • Thai surname8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Thailand, United States, Ireland, United Kingdom

    Also written Bermingham, เบอร์มิ่งแฮม, เบอร์มิ้งแฮม, เบอรมงแฮม, เบอร์มิงแฮม

  • Russian surname4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Russia

    Also written Бирмингем

48 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Birmingham 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, the W Midlands. In Domesday Book the name is already found as Bermingeham, but it seems likely that it was orig¬ inally Beommundingaham ‘homestead (OE ham) of the people of Beommund', a personal name composed of the elements beom young man, warrior + mund protection. Var.: Bermingham (this spelling now found chiefly in Ireland).

    as a nameA dictionary of surnames

  • In English, A major city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands, England, historically in Warwickshire with a population of over one million.

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

  • In English, city, England

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  • In English, Peter de Bremingeham 1170 P (St); Gilbert de Birmingeham 1271–2 FFL; John de Burmyngham 1333 KB (Wa); John Bermyncham 1340–1450 GildC. From Birmingham (Wa).

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • In Welsh, Birmingham (a major city and metropolitan borough of the West Midlands, England)

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

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)

18001850190019502000John Birmingham, b. 1816Joe Birmingham, b. 1884Stephen Birmingham, b. 1929Judy Birmingham, b. 1932David Birmingham, b. 1938Gil Birmingham, b. 1953Warren Birmingham, b. 1962John Birmingham, b. 1964Brenton Birmingham, b. 1972Simon Birmingham, b. 1974

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 Birmingham
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020106.6K#5,297
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020006.2K#5,181
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020205.8K#5,787
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 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 Birmingham mean, and where does it come from?
from Birmingham, Warwickshire; first attested Peter de Bremingeham 1170 P (St) Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
In which country does Birmingham have the most bearers?
Birmingham is most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom, where it is most often spelled birmingham.

What do you want to know about Birmingham?

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/birmingham

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, “Birmingham”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Birmingham parses inside a full name →