Kaiser
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: (i) ‘servant at the court of an emperor’, or a nickname for someone imperious; (ii) a Jewish surname based on German Kaiser
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/kaɪzɚ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kaiser is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country, where it is the 39th most common surname.
- DEGermany≈1 in 1K(inferred from the name graph)
- ATAustria≈1 in 1.6K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 2.2K
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.
- Germany (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 473 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 869 (inferred from the name graph)
≈77,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Liechtenstein, est.
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.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
(i) ‘servant at the court of an emperor’, or a nickname for someone imperious; (ii) a Jewish surname based on German Kaiser.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 17 languages in the etymology graph.
How Kaiser is read(measured from records)
Kaiser is one spelling over 2 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English59%
(i) ‘servant at the court of an emperor’, or a nickname for someone imperious; (ii) a Jewish surname based on German Kaiser.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
- German25%
German surname from the title 'Kaiser' 'emperor' (status/personal-characteristic name); bearer count in page: 35,768 tokens.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 5: Familiennamen nach Beruf und persönlichen Merkmalen
Personal- characteristic/status surname from 'emperor'; variants and patronymic genitives widespread.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 5: Familiennamen nach Beruf und persönlichen Merkmalen
occupational or status name from 'emperor'
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
ornamental name from German Kaiser ‘emperor’, adopted (like Graf, Herzog, etc.) because of its aristocratic connotations.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
from Arabic qaysar ‘emperor’, which, like 1, is of Latin origin, from the imperial title in the Roman Empire.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kaiser 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 | #39 | ≈77,000 est. | ≈1 in 1K | — | Kaiser | 236 |
| US United States | #915 | 33,480 | 1 in 9.9K | 33K | Kaiser | 473 |
| AT Austria | #57 | ≈5,600 est. | ≈1 in 1.6K | 4 | Kaiser | 119 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈4,000 est. | ≈1 in 16K | 4 | Kaiser | 117 |
| CH Switzerland | #141 | 3,902 | 1 in 2.2K | 3.9K | Kaiser | 94 |
| LU Luxembourg | — | ≈200 est. | ≈1 in 3.1K | 1.4K | — | 17 |
| LI Liechtenstein | — | ≈45 est. | ≈1 in 869 | 228 | — | 35 |
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; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); Statistik Austria — STATatlas Vornamen WFS (per-name time series 1984–2024); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Luxembourg top-100 surnames (surnam.es); Statistik Liechtenstein — Familiennamenstatistik (surnames). 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).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Friedrich Kaiserb. 1814DEAustrian dramatist (1814-1874)
- Georg Kaiserb. 1878DEGerman dramatist (1878-1945)
- Henry John Kaiserb. 1882USAmerican industrialist (1882–1967)
- Jakob Kaiserb. 1888DEGerman politician (1888-1961)
- Ray Eamesb. 1912USnot in their usual nameAmerican artist, designer, and filmmaker (1912–1988)
- Willy Kaiserb. 1912DEboxer (1912–1986)
- George Kaiserb. 1942USAmerican businessman
- Oldřich Kaiserb. 1955CZCzech actor
- Dominik Kaiserb. 1988DEGerman footballer
- Ludwig Kaiserb. 1990DEGerman professional wrestler (born 1990)
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 73 sources across 36 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 33K | #1,039 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 33K | #977 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 32K | #1,068 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 3.9K | #161 |
| LI Liechtenstein | Statistik Liechtenstein — Familiennamenstatistik (surnames) | 2020 | 228 | — |
Reference works 9
- 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)
- 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
- Hoffman, Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings (2nd ed., 2012)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
- Søndergaard, Georg, Danske efternavne (Lademann 1984/1991)
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 Kaiser mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) ‘servant at the court of an emperor’, or a nickname for someone imperious; (ii) a Jewish surname based on German Kaiser. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How common is the name Kaiser?
- In the United States, the national register counted 33,480 people named Kaiser in 2010, about 1 in 9.9 thousand residents.
- How common is Kaiser compared with other names?
- In Germany, Kaiser is the 39th most common surname of 765,306 surnames recorded there.
- How do you pronounce Kaiser?
- A machine transcription gives /kaɪzɚ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Kaiser have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 77 thousand people named Kaiser in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kaiser.
What do you want to know about Kaiser?
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/kaiserThe 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, “Kaiser” — the 39th most common surname in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.