Lafayette

loc · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Lafayette is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States. Recorded meaning: Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette (1757–1834), a French aristocrat who is considered a national hero in both France and the United States for his participation in the French and American revolu.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States
  • CACanada
  • 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.

United States (inferred from the name graph)

no count published

Sources
287 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette (1757–1834), a French aristocrat who is considered a national hero in both France and the United States for his participation in the French and American revolutions.

Sources 1

  • kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Lafayette counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Where Lafayette is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—2.6KLafayette287
CA Canada—1Lafayette63
GB United Kingdom——Lafayette52
RU Russia——Lafayette5
AU Australia——Lafayette20
BR Brazil—131—3

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; Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror). 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Lafayette is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • French name2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, Gabon

54 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Lafayette 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.

  • In English, /. Marquis de, French general

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper 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)

18001850190019502000Lafayette S. Foster, b. 1806Lafayette McLaws, b. 1821Lafayette Young, b. 1848Hugo Black, b. 1886H. L. Hunt, b. 1889Alec Wilder, b. 1907L. Ron Hubbard, b. 1911Lafayette G. Pool, b. 1919Lafayette Leake, b. 1919Oliver Lafayette, b. 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).

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 24 sources across 9 countries.

Official registers attesting Lafayette
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020102.6K#12,035
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020002.4K#12,009
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020202.3K#12,598
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—301#26,321
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 4

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • 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 Lafayette mean, and where does it come from?
Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette (1757–1834), a French aristocrat who is considered a national hero in both France and the United States for his participation in the French and American revolu… Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
In which country does Lafayette have the most bearers?
Lafayette is most frequently recorded in the United States, where it is most often spelled lafayette.

What do you want to know about Lafayette?

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Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/lafayette

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use; a free API key gives 1,000 requests a day, and bulk access is licensed separately.

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, “Lafayette”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Lafayette parses inside a full name →