Kleiman
surname · Latin script
Meaning: German and Jewish (Ashkenazic); nickname from a reduced form of German Kleinmann ‘small man’ or a variant of the Yiddish form, klayman
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Kleiman is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 111K(measured from records)
- ILIsrael1 in 6Kas קליימן
- MDMoldova≈1 in 12K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Kleiman itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 275 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 12K (inferred from the name graph)
3,009 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Moldova, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled קליימן in IL Israel, LV Latvia, UZ Uzbekistan.
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)
German and Jewish (Ashkenazic); nickname from a reduced form of German Kleinmann ‘small man’ or a variant of the Yiddish form, klayman.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kleiman 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 | — | 3,009 | 1 in 111K | 3K | Kleiman | 275 |
| CN China | — | ≈2,200 est. | ≈1 in 646K | — | Kleiman | 4 |
| IL Israel | #493 | 1,435as קליימן | 1 in 6K | 1.4K | קליימן | 45 |
| UZ Uzbekistan | — | ≈1,300 est. | ≈1 in 23K | — | קליימן | 2 |
| RO Romania | — | ≈440 est. | ≈1 in 49K | — | Kleiman | 2 |
| MD Moldova | — | ≈290 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Kleiman | 4 |
| LV Latvia | — | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 8.5K | — | קליימן | 3 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 71 | 1 in 48K | 71 | — | 1 |
3,009 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; CBS Israel — Family names in Israel, 2017 ("שמות משפחה בישראל 2017"); INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public). 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)
Kleiman is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
topographic name for a farmer who worked on heavy clay soil (see Kleier).
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)
- Johannes Kleimanb. 1896NLConcealer of Anne Frank (1896-1959)
- Vladimir Leonidovich Kleymanb. 1930RUnot in their usual nameRussian engineer
- Naum Kleimanb. 1937RURussian film critic
- Steven Kleimanb. 1942USAmerican mathematician
- Devra G. Kleimanb. 1942USAmerican zoologist (1942–2010)
- Mark A.R. Kleimanb. 1951USAmerican criminologist
- Dave Kleimanb. 1967USAmerican computer investigator
- Pascal Kleimanb. 1968FRFrench disc jockey
- Ariel Kleimanb. 1985AUAustralian film director and screenwriter
- Nicolas Kleimanfilm editor
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 28 sources across 17 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 3K | #10,638 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.3K | #12,553 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2K | #14,405 |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 71 | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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
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 Kleiman mean, and where does it come from?
- German and Jewish (Ashkenazic); nickname from a reduced form of German Kleinmann ‘small man’ or a variant of the Yiddish form, klayman. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Kleiman have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 3.0 thousand people named Kleiman, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kleiman.
- How common is the name Kleiman?
- In the United States, the national register counted 3,009 people named Kleiman in 2010, about 1 in 111 thousand residents.
- How common is Kleiman compared with other names?
- In Israel, Kleiman is the 493rd most common surname of 325,634 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kleiman?
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/kleimanThe 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, “Kleiman” — the 493rd most common surname in Israel. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.