Holford
surname · Latin script
Meaning: person from Holford, various English places meaning ‘ford in a hollow’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈhoʊɫfɝd/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Holford is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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)
person from Holford, various English places meaning ‘ford in a hollow’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Holford counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
| Country | Most common spelling | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 1.3K | — |
| GY Guyana | — | 23 | — |
| ES Spain | — | 11 | — |
| FI Finland | — | 10 | — |
| CK Cook Islands | — | 6 | — |
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; Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Cook Islands Electoral Rolls (2022 General Election + 2024 Pa Enua). 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)
Holford 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, habitational name from any of various places named Holford, for example in Somerset, or from Holdforth in Durham, so named from Old English hoi ‘hollow’, ‘sunken’, ‘deep’ +ford ‘ford’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, places, for example in Somerset, so called from OE hoi hol¬ low, sunken, deep + ford Ford. Vars.: Houlford, Holdford, Holdforth.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, from Holford (Somerset) or Holford Farm in Chailey, Sussex; first attested Jordan de Holeford 1179 P (Somerset)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
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)
- Margaret Holfordb. 1757English novelist, playwright, poet (1757-1834)
- Margaret Holfordb. 1778GBEnglish poet, translator (1778–1852)
- Robert Stayner Holfordb. 1808GBBritish politician (1808–1892)
- Castello Newton Holfordb. 1845USAmerican novelist
- Will Holfordb. 1862GBEnglish footballer (1862-1907)
- Tom Holfordb. 1878GBEnglish footballer and football manager (1878-1964)
- William Holford, Baron Holfordb. 1907GBBritish architect and town planner (1907–1975)
- David Holfordb. 1940BBWest Indian cricketer
- Karen Holfordb. 1962GBWelsh professor
- Patrick Holfordb. 2000GBBritish nutritionist
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 23 sources across 13 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.3K | #20,961 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.2K | #20,298 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.2K | #21,950 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 23 | #602 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 11 | #114,632 |
| CK Cook Islands | Cook Islands Electoral Rolls (2022 General Election + 2024 Pa Enua) | 2022 | 6 | #53 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Holford mean, and where does it come from?
- person from Holford, various English places meaning ‘ford in a hollow’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Holford?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈhoʊɫfɝd/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Holford have the most bearers?
- Holford is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Holford?
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/holfordThe 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, “Holford”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.