Chopin
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) From a nickname for a heavy drinker or truculent person; (ii) reduced form of Polish Szopinski, ‘person from Szopa, Szopinek or Szopy’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Chopin is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- BEBelgium1 in 301K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 535K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 646K
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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 18 (measured from records)
- 1 in 301K (inferred from the name graph)
622 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Belgium
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(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)
(i) From a nickname for a heavy drinker or truculent person; (ii) reduced form of Polish Szopinski, ‘person from Szopa, Szopinek or Szopy’.
Sources 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)
Chopin 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 | 622 | 1 in 535K | 699 | Chopin | 18 |
| BE Belgium | 39 | 1 in 301K | 39 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 16 | 1 in 3.1M | 16 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | 13 | 1 in 646K | 13 | — | — |
| PL Poland | 2 | 1 in 19M | 2 | — | — |
| CR Costa Rica | 1 | 1 in 5.1M | 1 | — | — |
622 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 2020; Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names. 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)
Chopin 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, from OFr chopine ‘old measure’; first attested Walter Chopin 1219 Cur (D)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Frederic, Polish composer, pianis
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, Katherine, US writer
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Breton, chopine ; clapet (de pompe) ; isolateur (de clôture)
as a wordDeshayes, Dictionnaire étymologique du breton (2003)
In Croatian, poljski skladatelj i pijanist, od 1831. živio u Parizu, skladao gotovo isključivo za glasovir (sonate, nokturna, mazurke, poloneze, valcere, klavirske koncerte)
as a wordHrvatski jezični portal (HJP) dictionary export
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)
- Nicolas Chopinb. 1771FRPolish teacher of French language and father of composer Frédéric Chopin (1771-1844)
- Tekla Justyna Chopinb. 1782PLmother of Frédéric Chopin
- Jean-Marie Chopinb. 1796FRFrench explorer
- Ivan Chopinb. 1798FRRussian historian (1798-1870)
- Frédéric Chopinb. 1810PLPolish composer and pianist (1810–1849)
- Emilia Chopinb. 1812PLPolish composer
- Felix Chopinb. 1817FRFrench sculptor and founder
- Kate Chopinb. 1850USAmerican author (1850–1904)
- Henri Chopinb. 1922FRFrench musician and poet (1922–2008)
- Carlos Carrillob. 1984SVnot in their usual nameSalvadoran footballer
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 19 sources across 10 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 699 | #34,822 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 622 | #36,048 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 496 | #41,382 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 39 | #31,006 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 16 | #94,489 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 13 | #50,156 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #317,528 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 1 | #20,120 |
| 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 Chopin mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) From a nickname for a heavy drinker or truculent person; (ii) reduced form of Polish Szopinski, ‘person from Szopa, Szopinek or Szopy’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Chopin have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 622 people named Chopin, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled chopin.
- Where is Chopin most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Chopin is densest in Belgium — about 1 in 301 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Chopin?
- In the United States, the national register counted 622 people named Chopin in 2010, about 1 in 535 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Chopin?
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/chopinThe 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, “Chopin”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.