Dempster
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Judge’; a feminine form of Deemster, but applied to men
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈdɛmpstɝ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Dempster is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- GYGuyana1 in 107K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 130K
- FIFinland1 in 186K
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
- 7 (measured from records)
- 1 in 107K (inferred from the name graph)
2,565 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Reference-verified
Guyana
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)
‘Judge’; a feminine form of Deemster, but applied to men.
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)
Dempster 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 | 2,565 | 1 in 130K | 2.6K | Dempster | 7 |
| FI Finland | 30 | 1 in 186K | 30 | — | — |
| NO Norway | 12 | 1 in 456K | 12 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 10 | 1 in 5M | 10 | — | 1 |
| GY Guyana | 7 | 1 in 107K | 7 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | 6 | 1 in 1.4M | 6 | — | — |
2,565 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; DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames). 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)
Dempster 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, feminine form of Deemer, used of men; northern and Manx term for ‘judge’; first attested Haldan Deemester 1296 Black (Perth)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Occupational name for a court officer on a landholding with legal rights; recorded in Perthshire from 1296 as Haldan de Emester.
as a nameScottish Surnames
An occupational name: on a landholding where the proprietor held legal rights, the dempster was his court officer (not a judge, as in England). These regalities were abolished in 1747 but by then the surname was well established. Haldan de Emester (deemster) is recorded in Perthshire from 1296.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, Alternative form of deemster.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Irish, Derived from the Manx word for a judge this name, numerous in Co. Down, is occasionally used as a synonym of Dempsey
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
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)
- Thomas Dempsterb. 1579GBBritish philologist, historian, poet and etruscologist
- Arthur Jeffrey Dempsterb. 1886CACanadian-American physicist (1886–1950)
- Hugh Dempsterb. 1900GBBritish actor (1900-1987)
- Carol Dempsterb. 1901USAmerican actress (1901–1991)
- Arthur P. Dempsterb. 1929USAmerican mathematician
- Stuart Dempsterb. 1936USAmerican musician
- Nigel Dempsterb. 1941INBritish writer (1941-2007)
- Ryan Dempsterb. 1977CACanadian baseball player
- John Dempsterb. 1983GBFootball player and manager (born 1983)
- Zakkari Dempsterb. 1987AUAustralian racing cyclist
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 23 sources across 13 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.6K | #12,148 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.4K | #11,753 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.4K | #12,508 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 30 | #34,994 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 12 | #52,330 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 10 | #120,154 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 7 | #618 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 6 | #89,778 |
| 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 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 Dempster mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Judge’; a feminine form of Deemster, but applied to men. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Dempster?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈdɛmpstɝ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Dempster have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 2.6 thousand people named Dempster, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled dempster.
- Where is Dempster most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Dempster is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 107 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Dempster?
- In the United States, the national register counted 2,565 people named Dempster in 2010, about 1 in 130 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Dempster?
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/dempsterThe 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, “Dempster”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.