Brisbane
loc · Latin script
Meaning: Perhaps from a medieval nickname for a hot-tempered person, from Old French briser 'to break' + Middle English ban 'bone'
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 11 countries · latest register: St Kitts & Nevis, 2026
Brisbane is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in Australia.
- AUAustralia
- CACanada
- USUnited States
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.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Perhaps from a medieval nickname for a hot-tempered person, from Old French briser 'to break' + Middle English ban 'bone'.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
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).
Other recorded senses
(measured from records)Brisbane 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, hybrid from Old French brise ‘break’ + Old English bān ‘bone’ (‘break bone’); first attested Ralph Briseban 1275 AD i (Middlesex)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Anglo-French hybrid brise bane ‘break bone’; first record William Brisbane, archer, 1298.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, OE ban bone. The sense of this hybrid name is not entirely Broad’) suggests that OE *Brada and ME Brade may have been in use as personal names. For the Northern ME retention of -a, cf. Roper. Vars.: Brade; Braid (Scots); Bradman. Cogn.: Ger.: Breit.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, OE ban bone. The sense of this hybrid name is not entirely clear; it may have been used for someone crippled by a broken bone or, more probably, for a violent man who broke other people’s bones. Vars. (of i): Du.: Brilleman. (Of 2): Bril.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A large city, the capital city of Queensland, Australia.
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)- Thomas Brisbaneb. 1773GBBritish Army general
- James Brisbaneb. 1774MYRoyal Navy admiral
- Matthew Brisbaneb. 1797GBexplorer
- William Henry Brisbaneb. 1806USAmerican abolitionist (1806–1878)
- Albert Brisbaneb. 1809USAmerican utopian socialist, writer, and journalist (1809–1890)
- George Brisbane Scott Douglasb. 1856GBBritish poet
- Arthur Brisbaneb. 1864USAmerican journalist (1864-1936)
- Brisbane Charles Somerville Warrenb. 1887IEIrish lepidopterist
- Jason Brisbaneb. 1983USathlete
- Yasmin Brisbaneactress
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)19 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.2K | #22,158 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.1K | #24,024 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1K | #23,104 |
| KN St. Kitts & Nevis | St Kitts & Nevis — Register of Electors 2026 | 2026 | 9 | #173 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025) | 2025 | 9 | #253 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 8 | #62,840 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 7 | #143,513 |
| DM Dominica | Dominica — Revised List of Electors May 2025 | 2025 | 5 | #222 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| GB United Kingdom | Scottish Surnames (Ross, 1994) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- 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 Brisbane mean, and where does it come from?
- Perhaps from a medieval nickname for a hot-tempered person, from Old French briser 'to break' + Middle English ban 'bone'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Brisbane have the most bearers?
- Brisbane is most frequently recorded in Australia.
What do you want to know about Brisbane?
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/brisbaneThe 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, “Brisbane”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.