Bourke
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Person who lives in a fortress’, from Middle English burk ‘fortress’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/bɒɹk/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Bourke is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- IEIreland≈1 in 3.3K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 2.7Kas Burke
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 7.3Kas Bergh
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Bourke itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 393 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 3.3K (inferred from the name graph)
122,877 named Burke, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Ireland, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Bergh in SE Sweden, FI Finland, ZA South Africa and 1 more, Burk in US United States, DK Denmark, Berg in NO Norway and Bek in IN India.
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)
‘Person who lives in a fortress’, from Middle English burk ‘fortress’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Bourke 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 | — | 122,877as Burke | 1 in 2.7K | 123K | Burk | 393 |
| NO Norway | — | 34,688as Berg | 1 in 158 | 35K | Berg | 29 |
| SE Sweden | — | 20,461as Berg | 1 in 499 | 20K | Bergh | 52 |
| IN India | — | 14,073as Bek | 1 in 94K | 14K | Bek | 9 |
| ZA South Africa | #818 | ≈7,700 est. | ≈1 in 7.3K | — | Bergh | 63 |
| FI Finland | — | 6,566as Berg | 1 in 849 | 6.6K | Bergh | 3 |
| DK Denmark | — | 4,441as Berg | 1 in 1.3K | 4.4K | Burk | 13 |
| IE Ireland | #221 | ≈1,500 est. | ≈1 in 3.3K | listed | Bourke | 125 |
| BE Belgium | #210 | 1,070as Buyck | 1 in 11K | 1.1K | Bergh | 100 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | — | 197as Burke | 1 in 515 | 197 | — | — |
122,877 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010, counting the spelling burke. 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; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025). 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)
Bourke 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, A topographical surname from Anglo-Norman for someone who lived in a fortified place.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, v. BURK
as a nameA Dictionary of English 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)
- Richard Bourkeb. 1777IEBritish Army general and colonial administrator
- Richard Bourke, 6th Earl of Mayob. 1822IEBritish Conservative statesman and 4th Viceroy of India (1822–1872)
- Robert Bourke, 1st Baron Connemarab. 1827IEBritish Conservative politician and colonial administrator (1827–1902)
- Margaret Bourke-Whiteb. 1904USAmerican photographer (1904-1971)
- Ciarán Bourkeb. 1935IEIrish singer (1935–1988)
- Mary Robinsonb. 1944IEnot in their usual nameformer President of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
- Pieter Bourkeb. 1953AUAustralian musician, audio engineer
- Peter Bourkeb. 1958AUAustralian middle distance runner
- Colin Raijin Bourkeb. 1984NZJapanese rugby sevens player
- Fiona Bourkeb. 1988NZNew Zealand rower
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)
Attested in 23 sources across 13 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.5K | #12,370 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.4K | #11,788 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.4K | #12,508 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 12 | #53,481 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 10 | #40,367 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 9 | #74,895 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 9 | #42,104 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- 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)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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
- How do you pronounce Bourke?
- A machine transcription gives /bɒɹk/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Bourke mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Person who lives in a fortress’, from Middle English burk ‘fortress’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Bourke have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 123 thousand people named Burke, more than in any other country we hold.
- How common is the name Bourke?
- In the United States, the national register counted 122,877 people named Burke in 2010, about 1 in 2.7 thousand residents.
- How common is Bourke compared with other names?
- In Belgium, Bourke is the 210th most common surname of 246,397 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Bourke?
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/bourkeThe 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, “Bourke” — the 210th most common surname in Belgium. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.