Clifton
loc · Latin script
Meaning: Person from Clifton, a place-name meaning farmstead on a bank or by a cliff
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Clifton is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- AUAustralia≈1 in 9.5K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 10K
- USUnited States1 in 13K
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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 463 (measured from records)
- 1 in 3.2K (inferred from the name graph)
≈80,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Dominica
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)
Person from Clifton, a place-name meaning farmstead on a bank or by a cliff.
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)
Clifton 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | ≈80,000 est. | ≈1 in 17K | — | Clifton | 12 |
| US United States | 24,758 | 1 in 13K | 33K | Clifton | 463 |
| PK Pakistan | ≈8,900 est. | ≈1 in 26K | — | Clifton | 6 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈6,500 est. | ≈1 in 10K | listed | Clifton | 199 |
| ID Indonesia | ≈2,700 est. | ≈1 in 98K | — | Clifton | 28 |
| AU Australia | ≈2,700 est. | ≈1 in 9.5K | 3 | Clifton | 158 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈450 est. | ≈1 in 11K | 11 | Clifton | 66 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | 25 | 1 in 4.1K | 33 | — | — |
| DM Dominica | 23 | 1 in 3.2K | 23 | — | 2 |
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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Australian national given names (aggregated state BDM); the hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 register; DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present); Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025); 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)
Clifton 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 Clifton (Bedfordshire, Cheshire, Cumberland, Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Lancashire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Westmorland, North Riding and West Riding of Yorkshire) and related places; first attested William de Cliftona c1145–65 Seals (Nb)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
Transferred use of the surname, a local name from any of the numerous places named with Old English clif ‘cliff’, ‘slope’, ‘riverbank’ + tun ‘enclosure’, ‘settlement’. Use of this as a given name is more recent than that of pClifford. It may in some cases have been adopted as an expanded form of Cliff.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
In English, ous places in all parts of England so called, from OE clif slope (see Clive) + tun enclosure, settlement.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, An English habitational surname from Old English for someone who lived in one of the places in England.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Also old form for Cohen.
as a nameThe Origin of Jewish Family Names: Morphology and History
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)
- Clifton Webbb. 1889USAmerican actor, singer and dancer (1889–1966)
- Elmer Cliftonb. 1890USAmerican film director (1890–1949)
- Cliff Edwardsb. 1895USnot in their usual nameAmerican recording artist; musician, singer, actor and voice actor (1895-1971)
- Clifton Jamesb. 1921USAmerican actor (1920-2017)
- Bill Haleyb. 1925USnot in their usual nameAmerican rock and roll music pioneer (1925–1981)
- Lucille Cliftonb. 1936USAmerican poet (1936-2010)
- Clifton Davisb. 1945USAmerican actor, musician and minister
- Clifton Powellb. 1956USAmerican actor and comedian
- Clifton Collins Jr.b. 1970USAmerican actor
- Paul Georgeb. 1990USnot in their usual nameAmerican basketball player (born 1990)
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 61 sources across 32 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 25K | #1,439 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 25K | #1,320 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 23K | #1,493 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025) | 2025 | 25 | #237 |
| DM Dominica | Dominica — Revised List of Electors May 2025 | 2025 | 23 | #204 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
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 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 Clifton mean, and where does it come from?
- Person from Clifton, a place-name meaning farmstead on a bank or by a cliff. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How common is the name Clifton?
- In the United States, the national register counted 24,758 people named Clifton in 2010, about 1 in 13 thousand residents.
- In which country does Clifton have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 80 thousand people named Clifton in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled clifton.
- Where is Clifton most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Clifton is densest in Dominica — about 1 in 3.2 thousand people — even though China holds more of our records for it.
What do you want to know about Clifton?
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/cliftonThe 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, “Clifton”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.