Kelling
surname · Latin script
Meaning: 1. from Middle Low German Kelling ‘pain’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ˈkɛɫɪŋ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kelling is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- DEGermany
- USUnited States
- GBUnited Kingdom
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
1. from Middle Low German Kelling ‘pain’. 2. variant of Kellmann (see Kellman).
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
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)
Kelling is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Icelandic, pronunciation spelling of kerling
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Faroese, old hag
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)
- Johann Friederich August Kellingb. 1820NZNew Zealand politician
- Georg Kellingb. 1866DEGerman surgeon (1866-1945)
- Coba Kellingb. 1893NLDutch actress (1893-1970)
- Frank Kellingb. 1904USanimator (1904-1949)
- George L. Kellingb. 1935USAmerican criminologist (1935-2019)
- Petra Kellingb. 1944DEGerman actress
- Volkmar Kellingb. 1951DEGerman badminton player
- Graeme Kellingb. 1957GBBritish musician (1957–2004)
- Ian Kellingb. 1981USFSF board member and systems administrator
- Lea Kellingb. 2000DEGerman association football player
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 16 sources across 9 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.9K | #11,016 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.4K | #17,859 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.2K | #21,445 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 195 | #37,537 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 30 | #36,152 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 30 | #40,906 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 6 | #154,812 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #346,747 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 1 | #161,353 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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
- Where does the name Kelling come from?
- 1. from Middle Low German Kelling ‘pain’. 2. variant of Kellmann (see Kellman). Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Kelling?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈkɛɫɪŋ/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Kelling mean?
- Recorded meaning: 1. from Middle Low German Kelling ‘pain’.
- In which country does Kelling have the most bearers?
- Kelling is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Kelling?
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/kellingThe 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, “Kelling”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.