Karloff
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Boris, US actor
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 2 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Karloff is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 3.1M(measured from records)
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. 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.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 5 (measured from records)
- 1 in 3.1M (inferred from the name graph)
107 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: reference-verified
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Карлофф in RU Russia.
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)Boris, US actor
Cited for this meaning 1
- Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
Where the surname Karloff is found
(measured from records)Karloff 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 | 107 | 1 in 3.1M | 124 | — | 5 |
| RU Russia | — | — | — | Карлофф | 2 |
| EE Estonia | — | — | listed | — | — |
107 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. 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)- Sara Karloffb. 1938USAmerican actress
- Christopher Karloffb. 1950GBBritish musician
- Howard Jeffrey Karloffb. 1961USPh.D. University of California, Berkeley 1985
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 2 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Karloff mean, and where does it come from?
- Boris, US actor Recorded by Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names.
- In which country does Karloff have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 107 people named Karloff, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Karloff most common?
- Karloff is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 3.1 million people carrying it.
- How common is the name Karloff?
- In the United States, the national register counted 107 people named Karloff in 2010, about 1 in 3.1 million residents.
What do you want to know about Karloff?
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/karloffThe 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, “Karloff”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.