Curie
surname · Latin script
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Curie is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In English, recorded as from a medieval nickname for someone with curly hair.
- CHSwitzerland1 in 1.1M(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 1.6M
- NLNetherlands1 in 1.9M
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
- 153 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.1M (inferred from the name graph)
211 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Switzerland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from a medieval nickname for someone with curly hair.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 8 languages in the etymology graph.
How Curie is read(measured from records)
Curie is one spelling over 3 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.
- English41%
from a medieval nickname for someone with curly hair.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
3.7×10¹⁰ decays per second, as a unit of radioactivity. Symbol Ci.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Marie S., French physicist (Nobel
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
French physicist (Nobel 1903)
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
- French37%
curia (all meanings)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Spanish13%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Curie in Spanish.
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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.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)
Curie 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 | 211 | 1 in 1.6M | 277 | Curie | 13 |
| BR Brazil | 34 | 1 in 6.2M | 34 | — | — |
| AR Argentina | 20 | 1 in 2.3M | 20 | — | — |
| NL Netherlands | 9 | 1 in 1.9M | 9 | — | 1 |
| CH Switzerland | 8 | 1 in 1.1M | 8 | — | 1 |
| BE Belgium | 2 | 1 in 5.9M | 2 | — | 4 |
211 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); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register). 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)
Curie 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 Portuguese, inflection of curiar:
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)
- Paul Curieb. 1799FRFrench physician
- Eugène Curieb. 1827FRFrench physician, Pierre and Jacques Curie's father
- Sophie-Claire Depouillyb. 1832not in their usual nameMother of Pierre and Jacques Curie
- Jacques Curieb. 1855FRFrench physicist (1855–1941)
- Pierre Curieb. 1859FRFrench physicist (1859–1906)
- Marie Curie-Sklodowskab. 1867FRPolish-born French physicist and chemist (1867–1934)
- Maurice Curieb. 1888FRFrench physicist
- Ève Curieb. 1904FRwriter, journalist and pianist, younger daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie (1904–2007)
- Daniel Curieb. 1927FRFrench physicist
- Parvine Curieb. 1936FRFrench sculptor (born 1936)
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 25 sources across 16 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 277 | #66,676 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 244 | #83,139 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 211 | #88,020 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 34 | #136,957 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 20 | — |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 9 | #65,536 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 8 | #72,019 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 2 | #142,032 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- 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 Curie mean, and where does it come from?
- from a medieval nickname for someone with curly hair. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Curie have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 211 people named Curie, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled curie.
- Where is Curie most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Curie is densest in Switzerland — about 1 in 1.1 million people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Curie?
- In the United States, the national register counted 211 people named Curie in 2010, about 1 in 1.6 million residents.
What do you want to know about Curie?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/curieThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use; a free API key gives 1,000 requests a day, and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Curie”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.