Hob
surname · Latin script
Meaning: pet-form of Robert, rhymed on Rob; first attested Hobbe Litel 1176 P (Sa) (A Dictionary of English Surnames)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 4 countries · latest register: DZS, 2021
/hɑb/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary
Hob is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country.
- HRCroatia1 in 136K(measured from records)
- DEGermany≈1 in 1.4Mfew records
- USUnited States≈1 in 13Mfew recordsas Hoeb
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 Hob itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Germany (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 77 (measured from records)
- 1 in 136K (inferred from the name graph)
≈59 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Croatia
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.
How to pronounce Hob
- English:/hɑb/(recorded in a dictionary) from Wiktionary
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)pet-form of Robert, rhymed on Rob; first attested Hobbe Litel 1176 P (Sa)
Cited for this meaning 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested across 22 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Hob is found
(measured from records)Hob 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DE Germany | ≈59 est. | ≈1 in 1.4M | — | Hob | 29 |
| HR Croatia | 31 | 1 in 136K | 31 | — | — |
| US United States | ≈27 est. | ≈1 in 13M | listed | Hob | 77 |
| NL Netherlands | ≈6 est. | ≈1 in 2.8M | — | Hob | 5 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈3 est. | ≈1 in 20M | listed | Hob | 27 |
| CA Canada | ≈3 est. | ≈1 in 16M | — | Hob | 8 |
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: DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form). 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)Hob is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, A kind of cutting tool, used to cut the teeth of a gear.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Danish, crowd, multitude (a large amount of people or animals)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In German, first/third-person singular preterite of heben
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In dsb, obsolete spelling of wob
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)- Hob Brounb. 1950USAmerican writer
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)6 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 4 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Hob mean, and where does it come from?
- pet-form of Robert, rhymed on Rob; first attested Hobbe Litel 1176 P (Sa) Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- What are other forms of the name Hob?
- In the etymology graph, Roberts, Berto and Rab are forms of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Hob?
- In English /hɑb/ (Wiktionary).
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Hob?
- Mondonomo estimates about 59 people named Hob in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled hob. After it come Croatia, United States, Netherlands and United Kingdom; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Hob most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Hob is densest in Croatia — about 1 in 136 thousand people — even though Germany holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Hob?
- In Croatia, the national register counted 31 people named Hob in 2021, about 1 in 136 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Hob?
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/hobThe 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, “Hob”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.