Goldberg
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) “Person from Goldberg,” various places in Germany, meaning “golden hill”; (ii) invented Jewish name, from German Goldberg “golden hill”
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Goldberg is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- ILIsrael≈1 in 4.4K(inferred from the name graph)
- CACanada≈1 in 9.8K
- USUnited States1 in 11K
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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 502 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 4.4K (inferred from the name graph)
29,603 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Israel, 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 Goldberg,” various places in Germany, meaning “golden hill”; (ii) invented Jewish name, from German Goldberg “golden hill.”
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Goldberg 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 | #719 | 29,603 | 1 in 11K | 30K | Goldberg | 502 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈4,900 est. | ≈1 in 13K | listed | Goldberg | 152 |
| CA Canada | #971 | ≈3,900 est. | ≈1 in 9.8K | — | Goldberg | 179 |
| DE Germany | — | ≈3,000 est. | ≈1 in 27K | — | Goldberg | 119 |
| IT Italy | — | ≈2,800 est. | ≈1 in 22K | — | Goldberg | 19 |
| IL Israel | — | ≈2,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.4K | — | Goldberg | 97 |
| IS Iceland | #800 | ≈74 est. | ≈1 in 4.8K | listed | Goldberg | 4 |
29,603 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000. 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)
Goldberg 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.
From a town in Silesia, the first Goldberg lived there in 1400. When the Jews left Silesia during the 14th century, many of the banished bore the name Golberg. More than 60,000 Gold- bergs are living today in the US. Jews revere in Poland a woman named Golda. Zolotovsky is the Slavic translation of Gold (gold) with suffix.
as a nameThe Origin of Jewish Family Names: Morphology and History
In German, ornamental name, a compound of German Gold ‘gold’ -I- Berg ‘mountain’, ‘hill’, or occasionally a habitational name of the same origin as 1.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In German, habitational name from any of numerous places named Goldberg.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, A surname from German, fairly common in the United States.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Leonard, US fdm and TV producer
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)
- Rube Goldbergb. 1883USAmerican cartoonist (1883–1970)
- Arthur Goldbergb. 1908USAmerican lawyer, politician and civil servant (1908-1990)
- Frank Gehryb. 1929USnot in their usual nameCanadian and American architect (1929–2025)
- Leonard Goldbergb. 1934USAmerican film and television producer (1934-2019)
- Whoopi Goldbergb. 1955USAmerican actress, comedian, author and television personality
- Eric Goldbergb. 1955USAmerican animator (born 1955)
- Bill Goldbergb. 1966USAmerican professional wrestler and football player (born 1966)
- Adam Goldbergb. 1970USAmerican actor
- Iddo Goldbergb. 1975ILIsraeli actor (born 1975)
- Evan Goldbergb. 1982CACanadian screenwriter (born 1982)
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 39 sources across 23 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 30K | #1,069 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 30K | #1,193 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 28K | #1,226 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 8
- 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 surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
- Hoffman, Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings (2nd ed., 2012)
- Søndergaard, Georg, Danske efternavne (Lademann 1984/1991)
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 Goldberg mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) “Person from Goldberg,” various places in Germany, meaning “golden hill”; (ii) invented Jewish name, from German Goldberg “golden hill.” Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Goldberg have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 30 thousand people named Goldberg, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled goldberg.
- How common is the name Goldberg?
- In the United States, the national register counted 29,603 people named Goldberg in 2010, about 1 in 11 thousand residents.
- How common is Goldberg compared with other names?
- In the United States, Goldberg is the 719th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Goldberg?
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/goldbergThe 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, “Goldberg” — the 719th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.