Knighton
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Person from a place called Knighton, from Old English ‘young men’s farmstead’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/naɪtən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Knighton is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
- AUAustralia
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)
Person from a place called Knighton, from Old English ‘young men’s farmstead’.
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)
Knighton is also recorded in 4 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 one of the many places named Knighton; first attested Alexander de Cnichteton’ 1181 P (Worcestershire)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, habitational name from any of the numerous places named with Old English cnihta, genitive plural of cniht ‘servant’, ‘retainer’ + tiin ‘enclosure’, ‘settlement’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, numerous places named with OE cnihta, gen. pi. of cniht servant, retainer + tun enclosure, settlement. Vars.: Knighten, Nighton.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, A placename:
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)
- Henry Knightonb. 1400GBEnglish historian
- Sir William Knighton, 1st Baronetb. 1775GBEnglish physician
- Leslie Knightonb. 1887GBEnglish football manager (1887-1959)
- Michael Knightonb. 1951GBEnglish football manager (born 1951)
- Margaret Knightonb. 1955NZNew Zealand equestrian
- Richard Knightonb. 1969GBRoyal Air Force officer and professional head, and aerospace engineer
- Axl Rottenb. 1971USnot in their usual nameAmerican professional wrestler (1971–2016)
- Zachary Knightonb. 1978USAmerican actor
- Brad Knightonb. 1985USAmerican soccer player
- Erriyon Knightonb. 2004USAmerican male sprinter
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 15 sources across 8 countries.
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 Knighton mean, and where does it come from?
- Person from a place called Knighton, from Old English ‘young men’s farmstead’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Knighton?
- A machine transcription gives /naɪtən/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Knighton have the most bearers?
- Knighton is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Knighton?
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/knightonThe 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, “Knighton”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.