Duty

surname · Latin script

Meaning: That which one is morally or legally obligated to do

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

/ˈdjuti/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Duty is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 71K(measured from records)
  • GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 114K
  • LBLebanon≈1 in 30K

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.

United States (measured from records)

4,685 people, 2010

Sources
293 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 30K (inferred from the name graph)

Lebanon, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

That which one is morally or legally obligated to do.

Sources 1

  • kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Duty 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.

Where Duty is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—4,6851 in 71K4.7KDuty293
GB United Kingdom—≈580 est.≈1 in 114K—Duty66
EG Egypt—≈450 est.≈1 in 229K—Duty7
DZ Algeria—≈300 est.≈1 in 144K—Duty2
CA Canada—≈210 est.≈1 in 180K—Duty18
LB Lebanon—≈180 est.≈1 in 30K—Duty1
BB Barbados#346———Duty1

4,685 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. 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Duty is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Polish surname5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Poland, United States, Czechia, Slovakia

    Languages: Polish, Czech, Slovak

    Also written Dutý

38 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Duty is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, hinda wé. njala-navoi

    as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language

  • In dsb, past passive participle of duś

    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)

1940196019802000Claude Duty, b. 1946Nicole Duty, b. 1977Kenton Duty, b. 1995

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)

FormalDear Duty,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 11 sources across 5 countries.

Official registers attesting Duty
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020104.7K#7,138
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020004.5K#6,832
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020204.3K#7,504
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 2

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • 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 Duty mean, and where does it come from?
That which one is morally or legally obligated to do. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
What are other forms of the name Duty?
In the etymology graph, Due is a form of the same name in other languages.
How do you pronounce Duty?
A machine transcription gives /ˈdjuti/ (IPA) for English.
In which country does Duty have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 4.7 thousand people named Duty, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled duty.
How common is the name Duty?
In the United States, the national register counted 4,685 people named Duty in 2010, about 1 in 71 thousand residents.
How common is Duty compared with other names?
In Barbados, Duty is the 346th most common surname of 11,500 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Duty?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/duty

The 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, “Duty” — the 346th most common surname in Barbados. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Duty parses inside a full name →