Linford

surname · Latin script

Meaning: person from Linford or Lynford, Buckinghamshire or Norfolk; perhaps ‘maple ford’ and ‘flax ford’

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

/ˈɫɪnfɝd/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Linford is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.

rarermore common
  • GBUnited Kingdom
  • USUnited States
  • TCTurks & Caicos Islands

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.

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

person from Linford or Lynford, Buckinghamshire or Norfolk; perhaps ‘maple ford’ and ‘flax ford’

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)

Linford 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 Linford (Bucks) or Lynford (Norfolk); first attested Geoffrey de Lineford 1202 FFNf.

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • Transferred use of the surname, a local name from any of various places, most of which are named with Old English Jin LINZI ‘flax’ or lind ‘lime tree’ + ford ‘ford’. In the case of Great and Little Linford in Berkshire, the first element is Old English hlyn ‘maple’. As a given name it is associated in particular with the British athlete Linford Christie.

    as a nameA concise dictionary of first names

  • In English, habitational name from Great and Little Linford in Buckinghamshire or Lynford in Norfolk. The former may have Old English hlyn ‘maple’ as its first element; the latter is more likely to contain lln ‘flax’. The second element in each case is Old English ford ‘ford’.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In English, Old English; from the lime tree ford

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

  • English: transferred use of the surname, which originated as a local name from any of various places named with the Old English elements lin flax or lind lime tree + ford ford. In the case of Great and Little Linford in Berkshire, however, the first element seems to have been originally Old English hlyn maple. The given name is associated in particular with the athlete Linford Christie.

    as a word

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)

190019502000Maurice Blood Linford, b. 1901Jorge Linford, b. 1902Velma Linford, b. 1907Victor Linford, b. 1940John Linford, b. 1957Lewis Linford, b. 1987

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)

FormalDear Linford,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 27 sources across 14 countries.

Official registers attesting Linford
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020201.1K#23,117
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000915#25,398
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010847#28,241
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)20245#101,952
NL NetherlandsCBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007)20075#76,372
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 4

  • 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
  • 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 Linford mean, and where does it come from?
person from Linford or Lynford, Buckinghamshire or Norfolk; perhaps ‘maple ford’ and ‘flax ford’ Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Linford?
A machine transcription gives /ˈɫɪnfɝd/ (IPA) for English.
In which country does Linford have the most bearers?
Linford is most frequently recorded in the United States.

What do you want to know about Linford?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/linford

The 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, “Linford”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Linford parses inside a full name →