Dunlop
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) Person from Dunlop, near Kilmarnock, ‘muddy fort’; (ii) from Irish Gaelic Ó Lapáin, nickname meaning ‘dirt, mud’, for a poor man; (iii) anglicization of Dunleavy
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Dunlop is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- AUAustralia≈1 in 9.8K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 13K
- CACanada≈1 in 14K
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)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 353 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 9.8K (inferred from the name graph)
≈12,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Australia, est.
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)
(i) Person from Dunlop, near Kilmarnock, ‘muddy fort’; (ii) from Irish Gaelic Ó Lapáin, nickname meaning ‘dirt, mud’, for a poor man; (iii) anglicization of Dunleavy.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Dunlop 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 | — | ≈12,000 est. | ≈1 in 121K | — | Dunlop | 6 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈5,100 est. | ≈1 in 13K | listed | Dunlop | 234 |
| US United States | — | 4,234 | 1 in 79K | 4.2K | Dunlop | 353 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈2,700 est. | ≈1 in 14K | — | Dunlop | 182 |
| AU Australia | #897 | ≈2,600 est. | ≈1 in 9.8K | — | Dunlop | 161 |
| NZ New Zealand | #920 | ≈370 est. | ≈1 in 13K | — | Dunlop | 87 |
| IE Ireland | — | ≈180 est. | ≈1 in 29K | — | Dunlop | 46 |
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. 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)
Dunlop 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 Ayrshire place-name, Gaelic dùn luibh, ‘fort on the bend’. Wilhelmus de Dunlop recorded from 1260.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, from the lands of Dunlop in Cunningham, Ayrshire; first attested William de Dunlop 1260
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
An Ayrshire location name, from Gaelic dùn luibh, ‘fort on the bend’. Wilhelmus de Dunlop is recorded from 1260 in the local area. John Boyd Dunlop (1840–1921) patented the pneumatic tyre in 1888.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, British family name
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, I. tire CO.
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)
- James Dunlopb. 1793AUAustralian astronomer (1793–1848)
- John Boyd Dunlopb. 1840GBScottish inventor
- Marion Wallace Dunlopb. 1865GBBritish artist and suffragette (1864-1942)
- John Thomas Dunlopb. 1914USAmerican labor economist and former United States Secretary of Labor (1975-1976)
- Frank Dunlopb. 1927GBBritish theatre director (1927–2026)
- Frankie Dunlopb. 1928USAmerican jazz drummer (1928-2014)
- Harry Dunlopb. 1933USAmerican coach and player in professional baseball
- Joey Dunlopb. 1952GBBritish motorcycle racer (1952–2000)
- George Dunlopb. 1956GBNorthern Irish footballer
- Blair Dunlopb. 1992GBBritish actor and musician
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 24 sources across 15 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 4.2K | #7,819 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 4.2K | #7,378 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 4K | #7,879 |
| GB United Kingdom | Scottish Surnames (Ross, 1994) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Dunlop mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) Person from Dunlop, near Kilmarnock, ‘muddy fort’; (ii) from Irish Gaelic Ó Lapáin, nickname meaning ‘dirt, mud’, for a poor man; (iii) anglicization of Dunleavy. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Dunlop have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 12 thousand people named Dunlop in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled dunlop.
- How common is the name Dunlop?
- In the United States, the national register counted 4,234 people named Dunlop in 2010, about 1 in 79 thousand residents.
- How common is Dunlop compared with other names?
- In Australia, Dunlop is the 897th most common surname of 552,428 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Dunlop?
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/dunlopThe 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, “Dunlop” — the 897th most common surname in Australia. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.