Gould
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Either from a Welsh nickname for a red-haired person, from Welsh coch ‘red’, or a variant of Gove/Gow/McGowan (ii)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 20 countries · latest register: Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines, 2025
Gould is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- VCSt. Vincent & Grenadines1 in 729(measured from records)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 3.9K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 4.2K
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)
- Record sources
- 491 (measured from records)
- 1 in 729 (inferred from the name graph)
38,924 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
St. Vincent & Grenadines
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)Either from a Welsh nickname for a red-haired person, from Welsh coch ‘red’, or a variant of Gove/Gow/McGowan (ii).
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Gould 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 | #688 | 38,924 | 1 in 8.5K | 39K | Gould | 491 |
| GB United Kingdom | #353 | ≈18,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.9K | — | Gould | 252 |
| CA Canada | #480 | ≈7,900 est. | ≈1 in 5.2K | — | Gould | 205 |
| AU Australia | #410 | ≈6,500 est. | ≈1 in 4.2K | — | Gould | 199 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈2,200 est. | ≈1 in 29K | — | Gould | 58 |
| NZ New Zealand | #416 | ≈1,000 est. | ≈1 in 5.2K | — | Gould | 110 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | — | 139 | 1 in 729 | 139 | — | 5 |
38,924 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; 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)Gould is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, Obsolete form of gold.
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)- John Gouldb. 1804GBEnglish ornithologist (1804–1881)
- Jay Gouldb. 1836USAmerican railroad magnate and financier (1836-1892)
- Gordon Gouldb. 1920USAmerican physicist and inventor (1920–2005)
- Harold Gouldb. 1923USAmerican actor (1923-2010)
- Glenn Gouldb. 1932CACanadian composer and pianist (1932–1982)
- Elliott Gouldb. 1938USAmerican actor (born 1938)
- Stephen Jay Gouldb. 1941USAmerican biologist and historian of science (1941–2002)
- Jason Gouldb. 1966USAmerican actor, filmmaker and singer
- Alexander Gouldb. 1994USAmerican actor, voice artist, producer, director, and screenwriter
- Nolan Gouldb. 1998USAmerican actor
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)33 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 20 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 39K | #891 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 38K | #836 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 37K | #925 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025) | 2025 | 139 | #129 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- 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)
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 Gould mean, and where does it come from?
- Either from a Welsh nickname for a red-haired person, from Welsh coch ‘red’, or a variant of Gove/Gow/McGowan (ii). Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Gould have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 39 thousand people named Gould, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled gould.
- Where is Gould most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Gould is densest in St. Vincent & Grenadines — about 1 in 729 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Gould?
- In the United States, the national register counted 38,924 people named Gould in 2010, about 1 in 8.5 thousand residents.
- How common is Gould compared with other names?
- In the United States, Gould is the 688th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Gould?
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/gouldThe 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, “Gould” — the 688th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.