Lafosse
surname · Latin script
Meaning: topographic name for someone who lived by a ditch, a variant of Fosse, with the definite article la
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 6 countries · latest register: BFS, 2024
/lafosse/(machine-generated) Spanish · model-generated
Lafosse is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in France than in any other country.
- FRFrance≈1 in 22K(inferred from the name graph)
- BEBelgium1 in 25K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 420K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- France (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 217 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 22K (inferred from the name graph)
≈3,200 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
France, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)topographic name for someone who lived by a ditch, a variant of Fosse, with the definite article la.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where the surname Lafosse is found
(measured from records)Lafosse 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FR France | ≈3,200 est. | ≈1 in 22K | 352 | Lafosse | 217 |
| US United States | 625 | 1 in 532K | 641 | Lafosse | 104 |
| BE Belgium | 470 | 1 in 25K | 470 | Lafosse | 43 |
| PE Peru | ≈130 est. | ≈1 in 269K | — | Lafosse | 10 |
| CA Canada | ≈97 est. | ≈1 in 425K | — | Lafosse | 18 |
| CH Switzerland | 20 | 1 in 420K | 20 | Lafosse | 8 |
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: INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames). 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).
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Philippe-Etienne Lafosseb. 1738FRFrench veterinarian (1738 - 1820)
- Victor Lafosseb. 1894FRcyclist
- Joachim Lafosseb. 1975BEBelgian film director
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)14 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 6 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Lafosse mean, and where does it come from?
- topographic name for someone who lived by a ditch, a variant of Fosse, with the definite article la. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Lafosse?
- In Spanish /lafosse/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Lafosse?
- Mondonomo estimates about 3.2 thousand people named Lafosse in France, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled lafosse. After it come United States, Belgium, Peru and Canada; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Lafosse?
- In the United States, the national register counted 625 people named Lafosse in 2010, about 1 in 532 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Lafosse?
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/lafosseThe 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, “Lafosse”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.