Ellington
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Person from Ellington’, various English places; mainly ‘farmstead where eels are found’ or ‘farmstead associated with Ella or Eli’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ɛʎɪŋtən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Ellington is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 29K(measured from records)
- CRCosta Rica1 in 340K
- SESweden1 in 444K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Ellington itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 27 (measured from records)
- 1 in 29K (inferred from the name graph)
11,522 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled אלינגטון in IL Israel.
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 Ellington’, various English places; mainly ‘farmstead where eels are found’ or ‘farmstead associated with Ella or Eli’
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Ellington 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 | 11,522 | 1 in 29K | 12K | Ellington | 27 |
| SE Sweden | 23 | 1 in 444K | 23 | — | — |
| CR Costa Rica | 15 | 1 in 340K | 15 | — | — |
| IL Israel | ≈7 est. | ≈1 in 1.2M | — | אלינגטון | 7 |
| DK Denmark | 5 | 1 in 1.2M | 5 | — | — |
11,522 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; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names; Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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)
Ellington is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, Cambs., Kent, Northumb., and N Yorks.; most are so called from OE Ellingtun ‘settlement (OE tun) associated with Ella’, a short form of the various cpd names with a first element celf elf, but the one in Kent has its first elem¬ ent from the OE byname Ealda Old.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A placename:
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Croatian, američki jazz-pijanist i skladatelj, uveo orkestralni stil u jazz
as a wordHrvatski jezični portal (HJP) dictionary export
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)
- Edward Ellingtonb. 1877GBBritish Army general
- Duke Ellingtonb. 1899USAmerican jazz pianist and composer (1899–1974)
- Buford Ellingtonb. 1907USAmerican politician (1907-1972)
- Mercer Ellingtonb. 1919USAmerican musician (1919–1996)
- Cat Ellingtonb. 1970USAmerican songwriter, casting director, poet, author, researcher, voice actress, and entrepreneur (born 1970)
- Tate Ellingtonb. 1979USAmerican actor
- Lee Ellingtonb. 1980GBEnglish footballer (born 1980)
- Nathan Ellingtonb. 1981GBBritish footballer (born 1981)
- James Ellingtonb. 1985GBBritish sprinter
- Wayne Ellingtonb. 1987USAmerican basketball player (born 1987)
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 30 sources across 17 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 12K | #3,132 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 11K | #3,010 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 11K | #3,266 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 23 | #22,768 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 15 | #4,371 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 5 | #61,491 |
| US United States | wru 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 Ellington mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Person from Ellington’, various English places; mainly ‘farmstead where eels are found’ or ‘farmstead associated with Ella or Eli’ Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Ellington?
- A machine transcription gives /ɛʎɪŋtən/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Ellington have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 12 thousand people named Ellington, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled ellington.
- Where is Ellington most common?
- Ellington is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 29 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Ellington?
- In the United States, the national register counted 11,522 people named Ellington in 2010, about 1 in 29 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Ellington?
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/ellingtonThe 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, “Ellington”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.