Gilchrist

surname · Latin script

Meaning: from Scottish Gaelic Gille Criosd, literally 'servant of Christ'

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

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

rarermore common
  • GDGrenada1 in 3.5K(measured from records)
  • VCSt. Vincent & Grenadines1 in 5.3K
  • USUnited States1 in 26K

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)

12,825 people, 2010

Sources
59 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 3.5K (inferred from the name graph)

Grenada

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

from Scottish Gaelic Gille Criosd, literally 'servant of Christ'

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Gilchrist 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 Gilchrist is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States12,8251 in 26K13KGilchrist41
ES Spain551 in 909K55—1
GD Grenada321 in 3.5K32——
SE Sweden261 in 392K26—1
VC St. Vincent & Grenadines191 in 5.3K19——

12,825 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; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); 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)

Gilchrist 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 Gaelic gille Críosd, ‘follower of Christ’; recorded as a surname with Patrick Gilcristes in 1296.

    as a nameScottish Surnames

  • In English, Gaelic Giolla Crist ‘servant of Christ’; first attested Gillecrist 1202 P (Cu)

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • As gille Críosd, ‘follower of Christ’, this was for centuries a forename before being recorded as a surname with Patrick Gilcristes, ‘sone del counte de Strivelyn’ (Stirling) in 1296. The eighth-century St Martin’s cross on Iona bears its sculptor’s name as Gillacrist.

    as a nameScottish Surnames

  • from the Gaelic personal name Gille Criosd ‘servant of Christ’.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In English, A surname from Scottish Gaelic.

    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)

1700180019002000John Gilchrist, b. 1759Albert W. Gilchrist, b. 1858Fred C. Gilchrist, b. 1868Connie Gilchrist, b. 1895Ellen Gilchrist, b. 1935Brent Gilchrist, b. 1967Adam Gilchrist, b. 1969Lara Gilchrist, b. 1982Garlin Gilchrist, b. 1982Keir Gilchrist, b. 1992

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 34 sources across 20 countries.

Official registers attesting Gilchrist
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201013K#2,811
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200012K#2,703
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202012K#2,909
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—55#41,965
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—55#41,513
GD GrenadaGrenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025202532#191
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—26#20,994
VC St. Vincent & GrenadinesElectoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025)202519#243
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 6

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • 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 Gilchrist mean, and where does it come from?
from Scottish Gaelic Gille Criosd, literally 'servant of Christ' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
In which country does Gilchrist have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 13 thousand people named Gilchrist, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled gilchrist.
Where is Gilchrist most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Gilchrist is densest in Grenada — about 1 in 3.5 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Gilchrist?
In the United States, the national register counted 12,825 people named Gilchrist in 2010, about 1 in 26 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about Gilchrist?

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

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, “Gilchrist”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Gilchrist parses inside a full name →