Hough

surname · Latin script

Meaning: person who lives by a hill-spur or from a place named Hough; from Old English hoh ‘hill-spur, ridge’

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/hɒk/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Hough is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 11K(inferred from the name graph)
  • AUAustralia≈1 in 14K
  • ZASouth Africa≈1 in 20K

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.

United States (measured from records)

15,549 people, 2010

Sources
409 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 10K (inferred from the name graph)

Iceland, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

person who lives by a hill-spur or from a place named Hough; from Old English hoh ‘hill-spur, ridge’.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Hough 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.

Where Hough is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—15,5491 in 21K16KHough409
GB United Kingdom#977≈6,100 est.≈1 in 11KlistedHough191
ID Indonesia—≈3,200 est.≈1 in 83K—Hough14
ZA South Africa—≈2,800 est.≈1 in 20K—Hough65
AU Australia—≈1,900 est.≈1 in 14K—Hough149
IE Ireland#979≈440 est.≈1 in 12K—Hough66
LB Lebanon#629≈410 est.≈1 in 13K—Hough2
IS Iceland—≈34 est.≈1 in 10K—Hough7

15,549 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; the hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 register. 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)

Hough is also recorded in 5 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, for example in Cheshire and Derbyshire, so named from Old Enghsh hoh ‘spur of a hill’ (literally ‘heel’). This widespread surname is especially common in Lancashire.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In English, places, for example in Ches. and Derbys., so called from OE hoh spur of a hill (literally ‘heel’). Var.: Huff.

    as a nameA dictionary of surnames

  • In English, Alternative form of hock (“the hollow behind the knee”).

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In English, Emerson, US novelist

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  • In enm, The heel (rear of a foot)

    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)

1850190019502000Emerson Hough, b. 1857Stan Hough, b. 1918Richard Hough, b. 1922John Hough, b. 1941Charlie Hough, b. 1948Stephen Hough, b. 1961Paul Hough, b. 1974Derek Hough, b. 1985Julianne Hough, b. 1988

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)

FormalDear Hough,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 22 sources across 12 countries.

Official registers attesting Hough
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201016K#2,345
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200015K#2,208
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202015K#2,426
GB United KingdomA Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988)———
US United Stateswru 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 Hough mean, and where does it come from?
person who lives by a hill-spur or from a place named Hough; from Old English hoh ‘hill-spur, ridge’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Hough?
A machine transcription gives /hɒk/ (IPA) for English.
What are other forms of the name Hough?
In the etymology graph, Hoe is a form of the same name in other languages.
In which country does Hough have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 16 thousand people named Hough, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled hough.
How common is the name Hough?
In the United States, the national register counted 15,549 people named Hough in 2010, about 1 in 21 thousand residents.
How common is Hough compared with other names?
In Lebanon, Hough is the 629th most common surname of 45,185 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Hough?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/hough

The 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, “Hough” — the 629th most common surname in Lebanon. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Hough parses inside a full name →