Claiborne
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Probably person from an unidentified place in southern England, perhaps meaning ‘stream in the clay’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈkɫeɪbɝn/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Claiborne is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 64K(measured from records)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 104K
- JMJamaica≈1 in 55K
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.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 323 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 55K (inferred from the name graph)
5,201 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Jamaica, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Probably person from an unidentified place in southern England, perhaps meaning ‘stream in the clay’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Claiborne 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 | 5,201 | 1 in 64K | 5.2K | Claiborne | 323 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈630 est. | ≈1 in 104K | listed | Claiborne | 24 |
| DZ Algeria | ≈440 est. | ≈1 in 98K | — | Claiborne | 1 |
| CA Canada | ≈270 est. | ≈1 in 141K | — | Claiborne | 18 |
| RU Russia | ≈190 est. | ≈1 in 740K | — | Claiborne | 4 |
| JM Jamaica | ≈51 est. | ≈1 in 55K | — | Claiborne | 1 |
5,201 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. 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)
Claiborne 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.
Transferred use of the surname of a major American family. William Claiborne (c.1587—c.1677), the second son of Edmund Cliburne of Cliburn in Westmorland (now Cumbria), was a founding colonist in Virginia. His descendant William Charles Claiborne (1775-1817) was the first governor of Louisiana.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, Liz, US fashion designer
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
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)
- William C. C. Claiborneb. 1775USAmerican frontier politician (c.1773–1817)
- Nathaniel Claiborneb. 1777USAmerican politician (1777-1859)
- Thomas Claiborneb. 1780USAmerican politician and lawyer (1780-1856)
- John Francis Hamtramck Claiborneb. 1809USAmerican politician (1809-1884)
- Lindy Boggsb. 1916USnot in their usual nameAmerican politician (1916-2013)
- Harry E. Claiborneb. 1917USAmerican judge (1917–2004)
- Craig Claiborneb. 1920USJournalist and book author (1920–2000)
- Liz Claiborneb. 1929USAmerican fashion designer (1929–2007)
- Shane Claiborneb. 1975USAmerican activist and author
- Preston Claiborneb. 1988USMajor League Baseball pitcher in the Texas Rangers organization
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 12 sources across 5 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 5.2K | #6,523 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 5.1K | #6,458 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 4.9K | #6,418 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 1
- 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 Claiborne mean, and where does it come from?
- Probably person from an unidentified place in southern England, perhaps meaning ‘stream in the clay’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Claiborne?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈkɫeɪbɝn/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Claiborne have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 5.2 thousand people named Claiborne, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled claiborne.
- How common is the name Claiborne?
- In the United States, the national register counted 5,201 people named Claiborne in 2010, about 1 in 64 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Claiborne?
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/claiborneThe 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, “Claiborne”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.