Blackburn

surname · Latin script

Meaning: Person from Blackburn, Lancashire, from a place-name meaning ‘dark stream’

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

Blackburn is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 5.4K(inferred from the name graph)
  • NZNew Zealand≈1 in 6K
  • CACanada≈1 in 6.7K

carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

China (inferred from the name graph)

≈140,000 people, est.

Sources
479 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 5.4K (inferred from the name graph)

United Kingdom, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Person from Blackburn, Lancashire, from a place-name meaning ‘dark stream’.

Sources 1

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

Where in the world(measured from records)

Blackburn 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.

Where Blackburn is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
CN China—≈140,000 est.≈1 in 10K—Blackburn10
US United States#79339,0971 in 8.5K39KBlackburn479
GB United Kingdom#483≈12,000 est.≈1 in 5.4KlistedBlackburn240
CA Canada#704≈5,600 est.≈1 in 6.7K—Blackburn215
EG Egypt—≈3,900 est.≈1 in 26K—Blackburn9
GH Ghana—≈3,800 est.≈1 in 7.7K—Blackburn13
NZ New Zealand#573≈820 est.≈1 in 6K—Blackburn76
IE Ireland#726≈700 est.≈1 in 7.4K—Blackburn37

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 hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 register. 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)

Blackburn is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish surname5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Argentina, Colombia, United Kingdom

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian

    Also written Blãçkbûrñ

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Black-Burn

61 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)

Blackburn is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, places, but especially the one in Lancs., so called from OE blase Black, dark + buma stream (see Bourne). The sur¬ name is mainly found in N England; the second element, buma, is characteristically northern. Vars.: Blackbume, Blackbourn(e).

    as a nameA dictionary of surnames

  • In English, A placename:

    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)

18001850190019502000Luke P. Blackburn, b. 1816Joseph Clay Stiles Blackburn, b. 1838Tony Blackburn, b. 1943Simon Blackburn, b. 1944Elizabeth Blackburn, b. 1948Olly Blackburn, b. 1950Marsha Blackburn, b. 1952Karoliina Blackburn, b. 1972Tyler Blackburn, b. 1986Rolando Blackburn, b. 1990

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 29 sources across 19 countries.

Official registers attesting Blackburn
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201039K#889
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200038K#826
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202038K#915
GB United KingdomA Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988)———
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 Blackburn mean, and where does it come from?
Person from Blackburn, Lancashire, from a place-name meaning ‘dark stream’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does Blackburn have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 136 thousand people named Blackburn in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled blackburn.
How common is the name Blackburn?
In the United States, the national register counted 39,097 people named Blackburn in 2010, about 1 in 8.5 thousand residents.
How common is Blackburn compared with other names?
In the United Kingdom, Blackburn is the 483rd most common surname of 1,272,424 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Blackburn?

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

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, “Blackburn” — the 483rd most common surname in United Kingdom. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Blackburn parses inside a full name →