Guess
surname · Latin script
Meaning: topographic name for someone who lived near a torrent or on a flood plain, from Middle High German ‘flood’, ‘flooding’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ɡɛs/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Guess is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 42K(measured from records)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 62K
- CACanada≈1 in 83K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Guess itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 342 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 26K (inferred from the name graph)
7,871 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Cuba, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Guss in DE Germany, PT Portugal, CU Cuba.
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)
topographic name for someone who lived near a torrent or on a flood plain, from Middle High German ‘flood’, ‘flooding’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Guess 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 | — | 7,871 | 1 in 42K | 7.9K | Guess | 342 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 62K | — | Guess | 92 |
| IT Italy | — | ≈610 est. | ≈1 in 102K | — | Guess | 6 |
| DE Germany | — | ≈480 est. | ≈1 in 166K | — | Guss | 69 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈460 est. | ≈1 in 83K | — | Guess | 48 |
| CU Cuba | — | ≈420 est. | ≈1 in 26K | — | Guss | 4 |
| PT Portugal | — | ≈160 est. | ≈1 in 66K | — | Guss | 1 |
| NZ New Zealand | — | ≈110 est. | ≈1 in 45K | — | Guess | 6 |
| BB Barbados | #133 | — | — | — | Guess | 2 |
7,871 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. 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)
Guess 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 English, To reach a partly (or totally) unconfirmed conclusion; to engage in conjecture; to speculate.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, probably a variant of Guest.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, variant of Geis.
as a nameDictionary of American Family 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)
- George W. Guessb. 1822USAmerican mayor
- Cameron Guessb. 1936USAmerican film producer
- Francis Guessb. 1946USAmerican businessperson and activist (1946-2015)
- Gretchen Guessb. 1969USpolitician
- Terry Guessb. 1974USfootball player (born 1974)
- Elizabeth Guessb. 1985USAmerican soccer player
- Deborah GuessAUAustralian academic
- Robert Guessbotanist
- Virginia Guessbotanist
- Andrew GuessUSresearcher ORCID ID = 0000-0003-2974-7848
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 12 sources across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 7.9K | #4,507 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 7.6K | #4,344 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 7.2K | #4,781 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 Guess mean, and where does it come from?
- topographic name for someone who lived near a torrent or on a flood plain, from Middle High German ‘flood’, ‘flooding’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Guess?
- A machine transcription gives /ɡɛs/ (IPA) for English.
- What are other forms of the name Guess?
- In the etymology graph, Guesser is a form of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Guess have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 7.9 thousand people named Guess, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled guess.
- How common is the name Guess?
- In the United States, the national register counted 7,871 people named Guess in 2010, about 1 in 42 thousand residents.
- How common is Guess compared with other names?
- In Barbados, Guess is the 133rd most common surname of 11,500 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Guess?
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/guessThe 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, “Guess” — the 133rd most common surname in Barbados. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.