Dunbar
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Person from Dunbar near Edinburgh, ‘fort on the summit’
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 20 countries · latest register: Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines, 2025
/dʌnˈbɑː(ɹ)/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary
Dunbar is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- VCSt. Vincent & Grenadines1 in 3.2K(measured from records)
- JMJamaica≈1 in 6.5Kfew records
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 9.3K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 456 (measured from records)
- 1 in 3.2K (inferred from the name graph)
26,405 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
St. Vincent & Grenadines
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 Dunbar near Edinburgh, ‘fort on the summit’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Dunbar 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 | — | 26,405 | 1 in 13K | 26K | Dunbar | 456 |
| GB United Kingdom | #981 | ≈7,500 est. | ≈1 in 9.3K | listed | Dunbar | 219 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈3,800 est. | ≈1 in 11K | — | Dunbar | 163 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈2,500 est. | ≈1 in 11K | 1 | Dunbar | 144 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈1,700 est. | ≈1 in 37K | — | Dunbar | 53 |
| IE Ireland | #950 | ≈510 est. | ≈1 in 11K | — | Dunbar | 59 |
| JM Jamaica | #305 | ≈430 est. | ≈1 in 6.5K | — | Dunbar | 13 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | — | 32 | 1 in 3.2K | 32 | — | 1 |
26,405 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; the scottish-surnames-ross-1994 register; SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 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)Dunbar 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 the East Lothian place-name, Brittonic din ‘fort’ + barr ‘height’. John de Dubar recorded in 1250.
as a nameScottish Surnames
A location name from the East Lothian town, of Brittonic origin: din, ‘fort’, and barr, ‘height’. John de Dubar is recorded in 1250. The most famous bearer of the name is William Dunbar (c.1459–c.1530) courtier and poet.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, John, Scottish poet
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Irish, The name of a Scottish clan which came to Ireland early in the seventeenth century and has since been mainly associated with Cos. Fermanagh and Donegal. At least one branch was identified with the Catholic and Irish cause from the time of James II. Dunbar is a toponymic
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
In sco, Dunbar (a town in East Lothian council area, Scotland)
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)- William Dunbarb. 1460GBmedieval Scottish poet and civil servant
- Paul Laurence Dunbarb. 1872USAmerican poet, novelist, and short story writer (1872–1906)
- Alice Dunbar Nelsonb. 1875USAmerican writer, activist (1875-1935)
- John Dunbarb. 1943GBBritish artist
- Aynsley Dunbarb. 1946GBBritish musician
- Robin Dunbarb. 1947GBBritish evolutionary psychologist (1947-)
- Bonnie J. Dunbarb. 1949USAmerican engineer and astronaut
- Adrian Dunbarb. 1958GBNorthern Irish actor
- Rockmond Dunbarb. 1973USAmerican actor
- Akil Mitchellb. 1992PAnot in their usual nameAmerican basketball player
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)32 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 20 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- In which country does Dunbar have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 26 thousand people named Dunbar, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled dunbar.
- Where is Dunbar most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Dunbar is densest in St. Vincent & Grenadines — about 1 in 3.2 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- What does the name Dunbar mean, and where does it come from?
- Person from Dunbar near Edinburgh, ‘fort on the summit’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Dunbar?
- In English /dʌnˈbɑː(ɹ)/ (Wiktionary).
- How common is the name Dunbar?
- In the United States, the national register counted 26,405 people named Dunbar in 2010, about 1 in 13 thousand residents.
- How common is Dunbar compared with other names?
- In Jamaica, Dunbar is the 305th most common surname of 50,451 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Dunbar?
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/dunbarThe 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, “Dunbar” — the 305th most common surname in Jamaica. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.