Birnie
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Moray name, probably from Gaelic braonach ‘rainy’; James de Brennath, burgess of Elgin, noted in 1261 (Scottish Surnames)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 11 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Birnie is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 518 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010. Birnie is also written Бирние in Cyrillic.
- NLNetherlands1 in 199K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 642K
- NONorway1 in 911K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 3 (measured from records)
- 1 in 199K (inferred from the name graph)
518 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Netherlands
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Birnie in other scripts: Cyrillic
(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)Moray name, probably from Gaelic braonach ‘rainy’; James de Brennath, burgess of Elgin, noted in 1261.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Scottish Surnames
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Birnie is found
(measured from records)Birnie 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 518 | 1 in 642K | 518 | Birnie | 3 |
| NL Netherlands | 87 | 1 in 199K | 87 | — | — |
| AR Argentina | 17 | 1 in 2.7M | 17 | — | — |
| BE Belgium | 11 | 1 in 1.1M | 11 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 10 | 1 in 5M | 10 | — | — |
| NO Norway | 6 | 1 in 911K | 6 | — | — |
| DK Denmark | 4 | 1 in 1.5M | 4 | — | — |
518 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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; CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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)Birnie is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
A Moray name, though like most surviving names it spread from the original location. It may originate from Gaelic braonach, ‘rainy’, though other sources have been suggested. Metathesis, as of ‘ra’ to ‘ar’ or ‘ir’ is a common occurrence in name evolution. James de Brennath, burgess of Elgin, is noted in 1261.
as a nameScottish 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 Birnie Philipb. 1824GBEnglish sculptor (1824–1875)
- Ted Birnieb. 1878GBEnglish footballer (1878–1935)
- Esmond Birnieb. 1965GBBritish economist and politician (born 1965)
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)17 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 11 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Birnie mean, and where does it come from?
- Moray name, probably from Gaelic braonach ‘rainy’; James de Brennath, burgess of Elgin, noted in 1261. Recorded by Scottish Surnames.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Birnie?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 518 people named Birnie, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled birnie. After it come Netherlands, Argentina, Belgium and Spain; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Birnie most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Birnie is densest in the Netherlands — about 1 in 199 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Birnie?
- In the United States, the national register counted 518 people named Birnie in 2010, about 1 in 642 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Birnie?
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/birnieThe 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, “Birnie” — ranked 39946th in the United States (Census Bureau, 2010). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.