Grimstad
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Grimstad is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Norway than in any other country. Recorded meaning: habitational name from any of about fifteen farmsteads so named from the Old Norse personal name Grlmr (see Grimsrud) + stadr ‘farmstead’.
- NONorway1 in 1.8K(measured from records)
- SESweden1 in 146K
- DKDenmark1 in 183K
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.
- Norway (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 7 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.8K (inferred from the name graph)
3,100 people
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Norway
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)
habitational name from any of about fifteen farmsteads so named from the Old Norse personal name Grlmr (see Grimsrud) + stadr ‘farmstead’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Grimstad 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NO Norway | 3,100 | 1 in 1.8K | 3.1K | Grimstad | 7 |
| US United States | 356 | 1 in 934K | 368 | — | 4 |
| SE Sweden | 70 | 1 in 146K | 70 | — | — |
| DK Denmark | 32 | 1 in 183K | 32 | — | — |
| BE Belgium | 3 | 1 in 3.9M | 3 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | 3 | 1 in 2.8M | 3 | — | — |
3,100 people counted by SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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: SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames). 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).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Carl M. Grimstadb. 1856USAmerican politician (1856–1940)
- Ivar Grimstadb. 1922NONorwegian writer (1922-2006)
- Arne Grimstadb. 1923NONorwegian writer (1923-2019)
- Arnljot Grimstadb. 1931NONorwegian author and writer
- Edvard Grimstadb. 1933NONorwegian politician (1933-2014)
- Birgitte Grimstadb. 1935NODanish-born Norwegian singer, guitarist, composer and writer
- Carl-Erik Grimstadb. 1952NONorwegian journalist
- Oskar Grimstadb. 1954NONorwegian politician
- May-Helen Molvær Grimstadb. 1968NONorwegian politician
- Lars Joachim Grimstadb. 1972NONorwegian footballer
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 16 sources across 8 countries.
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- 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 Grimstad mean, and where does it come from?
- habitational name from any of about fifteen farmsteads so named from the Old Norse personal name Grlmr (see Grimsrud) + stadr ‘farmstead’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Grimstad have the most bearers?
- In Norway, the national register counted about 3.1 thousand people named Grimstad, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled grimstad.
- Where is Grimstad most common?
- Grimstad is densest in Norway, where the national register counts about 1 in 1.8 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Grimstad?
- In Norway, the national register counted 3,100 people named Grimstad, about 1 in 1.8 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Grimstad?
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/grimstadThe same 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), and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Grimstad”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.