Kinsey
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from medieval personal name Kynsey, from Old English Cynesige, literally 'royal victory'
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/kɪnzi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kinsey is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- USUnited States
- GBUnited Kingdom
- CACanada
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)
from medieval personal name Kynsey, from Old English Cynesige, literally 'royal victory'
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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)
Kinsey 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, from OE Cynesige ‘royal victory’; first attested William Kynsei 1306 IpmGl
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Old English; a victorious king or prince
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
In English, from the Middle English personal name Kynsey, a survival of Old English Cynesige, composed of the elements cyne ‘royal’ -i- sige ‘victory’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, Possibly an Americanized spelling of Swiss German Kiinzi (see Kuenzi). The paternal grandfather of NJ and PA legislator John Kinsey (16931750) was one of the conunissioners sent out from England in 1677 by the West Jersey proprietors to buy land from the Indians and to lay out a town. John was the leader of the Quaker party in the PA assembly and chief justice of the PA supreme court.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, This name may also have assimilated some cases of Scottish Mackenzie, with the Mac prefix omitted.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
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)
- James Kinseyb. 1731USAmerican politician
- Charles Kinseyb. 1773USAmerican politician (1773-1849)
- Alfred Kinseyb. 1894USAmerican sexologist (1894–1956)
- Robert Kinseyb. 1897USUS tennis player (1897–1964)
- Howard Kinseyb. 1899USUS tennis player (1899–1966)
- Dan Kinseyb. 1902USAmerican athlete (1902–1970)
- Donald Kinseyb. 1953USAmerican guitarist and singer (1953–2024)
- Lance Kinseyb. 1954CACanadian actor and screenwriter
- Angela Kinseyb. 1971USAmerican actress
- Tarence Kinseyb. 1984USAmerican basketball player (born 1984)
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 34 sources across 18 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 16K | #2,258 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 15K | #2,169 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 15K | #2,329 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 9 | #126,713 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 6 | #48,950 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 4 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 4 | — |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 4 | #118,617 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 4 | #225,309 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 4 | #227,651 |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 2 | #197,061 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 2 | #17,480 |
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 Kinsey mean, and where does it come from?
- from medieval personal name Kynsey, from Old English Cynesige, literally 'royal victory' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Kinsey?
- A machine transcription gives /kɪnzi/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Kinsey have the most bearers?
- Kinsey is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Kinsey?
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/kinseyThe 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, “Kinsey”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.