Carrier
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: Person who transports goods; or quarryman, stonemason
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/kæɹɪə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Carrier is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 25K(measured from records)
- DMDominica1 in 25K
- UYUruguay1 in 79K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 117 (measured from records)
- 1 in 25K (inferred from the name graph)
13,377 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Dominica
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Person who transports goods; or quarryman, stonemason.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
How Carrier is read(measured from records)
Carrier is one spelling over 2 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English76%
Person who transports goods; or quarryman, stonemason.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
from ONFr carier ‘carrier, porter’; first attested Robert de (sic) Carier 1332 SRCu
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
A person or object that carries someone or something else.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Willis Haviland, US engineer and
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
- French15%
de carrier, surnom d’un voiturier ou d’un ouvrier dans une carrière
as a nameDictionnaire des noms de famille du Canada français. Anthroponymie et généalogie. 2e édition
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Carrier 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 | 13,377 | 1 in 25K | 13K | Carrier | 117 |
| BR Brazil | 112 | 1 in 1.9M | 112 | Carrier | 28 |
| CH Switzerland | 77 | 1 in 109K | 77 | — | 2 |
| BE Belgium | 72 | 1 in 163K | 72 | — | 3 |
| UY Uruguay | 43 | 1 in 79K | 43 | — | 13 |
| DM Dominica | 3 | 1 in 25K | 3 | — | — |
13,377 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); Dominica — Revised List of Electors May 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)
Carrier 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.
In Italian, variante regional setentrional de Carrer
as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
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)
- Benedict XIVb. 1370FRnot in their usual nameantipope from 1430 to 1437
- Jean-Baptiste Carrierb. 1756FRFrench revolutionary (1756-1799)
- Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuseb. 1824FRFrench Sculptor (1824–1887)
- Louis-Robert Carrier-Belleuseb. 1848FRFrench painter (1848-1913)
- Pierre Carrier-Belleuseb. 1851FRFrench painter (1851-1932)
- Willis Haviland Carrierb. 1876USAmerican inventor (1876–1950)
- George F. Carrierb. 1918USmathematician and Professor of Applied Mathematics Emeritus of Harvard University (1918–2002)
- Robert Carrierb. 1923USAmerican chef (1923-2006)
- Darel Carrierb. 1940USAmerican basketball player
- Richard Carrierb. 1969USAmerican historian and philosopher
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 22 sources across 12 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 13K | #2,467 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 13K | #2,692 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 13K | #2,720 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 112 | #58,162 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 77 | #13,481 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 72 | #20,007 |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 43 | — |
| DM Dominica | Dominica — Revised List of Electors May 2025 | 2025 | 3 | #224 |
| 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)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
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 Carrier mean, and where does it come from?
- Person who transports goods; or quarryman, stonemason. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Carrier?
- A machine transcription gives /kæɹɪə/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Carrier have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 13 thousand people named Carrier, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled carrier.
- Where is Carrier most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Carrier is densest in Dominica — about 1 in 25 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Carrier?
- In the United States, the national register counted 13,377 people named Carrier in 2010, about 1 in 25 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Carrier?
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/carrierThe 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, “Carrier”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.