Heier
surname · Latin script
Meaning: habitational name from any of several farmsteads so named in the Oslofjord region
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Heier is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- NONorway1 in 5.2K(measured from records)
- SESweden1 in 167K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 40Kas Heyer
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Heier 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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 17 (measured from records)
- 1 in 5.2K (inferred from the name graph)
3,295 named Heyer, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Norway
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Heyer in US United States.
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 several farmsteads so named in the Oslofjord region. The place name is from the plural of Old Norse heidr ‘heath’, ‘moor’.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Heier 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 | 3,295as Heyer | 1 in 101K | 3.3K | Heyer | 8 |
| NO Norway | 1,042 | 1 in 5.2K | 1K | — | 1 |
| CH Switzerland | 212as Heyer | 1 in 40K | 212 | — | — |
| PL Poland | 104as Heyer | 1 in 368K | 56 | Heier | 3 |
| NL Netherlands | 70as Heyer | 1 in 247K | 70 | — | 1 |
| SE Sweden | 61 | 1 in 167K | 61 | — | — |
| FI Finland | 33as Heyer | 1 in 169K | 33 | — | — |
3,295 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; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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)
Heier 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.
generally a variant of Hauer, but in some cases an occupational name from Middle High German heie ‘ranger’, ‘guard’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In Norwegian Nynorsk, indefinite plural of hei
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In bar, this year
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)
- Peter Heierb. 1895USAmerican missionary
- Knut S. Heierb. 1929NONorwegian geochemist (1929–2008)
- Solfrid Heierb. 1945NONorwegian actor and singer
- Siegfried Heierb. 1946DEGerman university teacher
- Hilde Heierb. 1952NONorwegian film director
- Liv Heierb. 1961NONorwegian painter (born 1961)
- Anne-Kathrin Heierb. 1977DEGerman writer, journalist and literary editor
- Melker Heierb. 2001SESwedish association football player
- Johann HeierGerman artist, active 1737
- Sigurd Heiermusher
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 24 sources across 13 countries.
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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
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
- Where does the name Heier come from?
- habitational name from any of several farmsteads so named in the Oslofjord region. The place name is from the plural of Old Norse heidr ‘heath’, ‘moor’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- What does the name Heier mean?
- Recorded meaning: habitational name from any of several farmsteads so named in the Oslofjord region.
- In which country does Heier have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 3.3 thousand people named Heyer, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Heier most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Heier is densest in Norway — about 1 in 5.2 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Heier?
- In Norway, the national register counted 1,042 people named Heier, about 1 in 5.2 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Heier?
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/heierThe 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, “Heier”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.