Lovelace
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from a medieval nickname for a woman-chaser or lothario, literally ‘without love’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Lovelace is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 24K(measured from records)
- VCSt. Vincent & Grenadines1 in 4.6K
- GDGrenada1 in 113K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 88 (measured from records)
- 1 in 4.6K (inferred from the name graph)
13,787 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
St. Vincent & Grenadines
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from a medieval nickname for a woman-chaser or lothario, literally ‘without love’
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Lovelace 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 | 13,787 | 1 in 24K | 14K | Lovelace | 88 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | 22 | 1 in 4.6K | 22 | — | — |
| SE Sweden | 10 | 1 in 1M | 10 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 6 | 1 in 8.3M | 6 | — | 6 |
| PL Poland | 5 | 1 in 7.7M | 3 | — | — |
| GD Grenada | 1 | 1 in 113K | 1 | — | — |
13,787 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; Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025. 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)
Lovelace 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 OE lufu ‘love’ + -lēas ‘free from, without’, ‘loveless’; first attested Edith Luvelece 1243 AssSo
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, variant of Loveless. The spelling is apparently the result of folk etymology, which understood the word as a nickname for a dandy fond of lace. The modem sense of this word is, however, not attested until the 16th century and at the time of surname formation it meant only ‘cord’ or ‘shoelace’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, ME lufelesse loveless, without love (OE lufu-leas), probably in the sense ‘fancy free’. 2. some early examples, such as Richard Lovelas (Kent 1344), may have as their second element ME las(se) girl, maiden (of disputed etymology); cf. Tiplady. Vars.: Loveless, Lowles(s).
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A surname transferred from the nickname.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In French, Lovelace est un personnage du roman anglais Clarisse Harlowe (1747-48) de Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). Le personnage devint fameux en raison du succès du livre et passa en français avec le sens de séducteur cynique ou de parfait libertin.
as a name2500 noms propres devenus communs : dictionnaire étymologique (éponymes, antonomases et hypallages)
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)
- John Lovelace, 2nd Baron Lovelaceb. 1616English baron
- Richard Lovelaceb. 1617GBEnglish writer and poet (1617-1658)
- Francis Lovelaceb. 1621GBRoyalist, early proprietary governor of New York
- John Lovelace, 3rd Baron Lovelaceb. 1640GBEnglish politician (1640-1693)
- John Lovelace, 4th Baron Lovelaceb. 1672USEnglish military officer, governor of the provinces of New York and New Jersey
- Carey Lovelaceb. 1901USAmerican art journalist, playwright, curator, and producer based in New York
- William Randolph Lovelace IIb. 1907USAmerican physician
- Earl Lovelaceb. 1935TTTrinidad and Tobago writer
- Amanda Lovelaceb. 1991USAmerican poet
- Richard V. E. LovelaceUSPh.D. Cornell University 1970
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 22 sources across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 14K | #2,613 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 13K | #2,478 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 13K | #2,640 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025) | 2025 | 22 | #240 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 10 | #39,190 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 6 | #154,812 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 3 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 3 | #273,004 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #355,320 |
| GD Grenada | Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025 | 2025 | 1 | #222 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 Lovelace mean, and where does it come from?
- from a medieval nickname for a woman-chaser or lothario, literally ‘without love’ Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Lovelace have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 14 thousand people named Lovelace, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled lovelace.
- Where is Lovelace most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Lovelace is densest in St. Vincent & Grenadines — about 1 in 4.6 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Lovelace?
- In the United States, the national register counted 13,787 people named Lovelace in 2010, about 1 in 24 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Lovelace?
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/lovelaceThe 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, “Lovelace”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.