Grise
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: variant spelling of Griset, a nickname for someone with gray hair, a gray complexion, or perhaps one who habitually wore gray, from Old French gris ‘gray’
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ɡɹiːz/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Grise is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the Central African Republic than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 334K(measured from records)
- CFCentral African Republic≈1 in 4.7K
- CACanada≈1 in 94K
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.
- Central African Republic (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 210 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 4.7K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,300 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Central African Republic, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
variant spelling of Griset, a nickname for someone with gray hair, a gray complexion, or perhaps one who habitually wore gray, from Old French gris ‘gray’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
How Grise is read(measured from records)
Grise is one spelling over 2 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English77%
variant spelling of Griset, a nickname for someone with gray hair, a gray complexion, or perhaps one who habitually wore gray, from Old French gris ‘gray’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
A step (in a flight of stairs); a degree.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- French8.7%
feminine singular of gris
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Grise 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CF Central African Republic | #147 | ≈1,300 est. | ≈1 in 4.7K | — | Grise | 1 |
| US United States | — | 997 | 1 in 334K | 997 | Grise | 210 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈400 est. | ≈1 in 94K | — | Grise | 70 |
| BR Brazil | — | 192 | 1 in 1.1M | 192 | — | — |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈190 est. | ≈1 in 352K | — | Grise | 12 |
| LR Liberia | — | ≈44 est. | ≈1 in 115K | — | Grise | 1 |
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; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). 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)
Grise 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 ang, first-person singular present indicative of grīsan
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Norwegian Nynorsk, to farrow, give birth to piglets (of a female pig)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Danish, indefinite plural of gris
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)
- Johann Christoph Griseb. 1647FRstudent, 1647-1668
- Johan Fredric Griseb. 1729SESwedish painter
- Alain Griséb. 1941FRFrench politician
- Virginia Griseb. 1976USAmerican playwright and director
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 16 sources across 8 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 997 | #24,934 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 968 | #24,271 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 915 | #27,837 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 192 | #37,992 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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
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 Grise mean, and where does it come from?
- variant spelling of Griset, a nickname for someone with gray hair, a gray complexion, or perhaps one who habitually wore gray, from Old French gris ‘gray’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Grise?
- A machine transcription gives /ɡɹiːz/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Grise have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.3 thousand people named Grise in the Central African Republic, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled grise.
- How common is the name Grise?
- In the United States, the national register counted 997 people named Grise in 2010, about 1 in 334 thousand residents.
- How common is Grise compared with other names?
- In the Central African Republic, Grise is the 147th most common surname of 1,109 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Grise?
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/griseThe 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, “Grise” — the 147th most common surname in Central African Republic. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.