Marks
surname · Latin script
Meaning: son of Mark, or a different form of Mark; also contracted form of German Markus (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 33 countries · latest register: Guyana, 2025
/mɑɹks/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary
Marks is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 49,177 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010. Marks is also written מארקס in Hebrew.
- GYGuyana1 in 704(measured from records)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 4.4K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 5K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 509 (measured from records)
- 1 in 704 (inferred from the name graph)
49,177 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Guyana
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Marks in other scripts: Hebrew
(measured from records)Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
How to pronounce Marks
- English:/mɑɹks/(recorded in a dictionary) from Wiktionary
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)son of Mark, or a different form of Mark; also contracted form of German Markus
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 23 languages in the etymology graph.
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Marks, most often first. They share a style rather than an origin.
From the names suggested together in public name-advice forums, in English. A list of what people consider, not a measure of how common any name is.
Where the surname Marks is found
(measured from records)Marks 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 | #554 | 49,177 | 1 in 6.8K | 49K | Marks | 509 |
| GB United Kingdom | #517 | ≈14,000 est. | ≈1 in 5K | listed | Marks | 237 |
| DE Germany | #988 | ≈7,100 est. | ≈1 in 12K | listed | Marks | 146 |
| CA Canada | #660 | ≈6,200 est. | ≈1 in 6.7K | — | Marks | 184 |
| AU Australia | #441 | ≈6,200 est. | ≈1 in 4.4K | — | Marks | 188 |
| GY Guyana | — | 1,066 | 1 in 704 | 1.1K | — | 14 |
| NZ New Zealand | #513 | ≈990 est. | ≈1 in 5.3K | — | Marks | 89 |
49,177 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; the dfa-band-6 register; Guyana — Official List of Electors July 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)Marks 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.
Shortened form of Markus. Marcus (o) Mark (x)
as a nameThe Origin of Jewish Family Names: Morphology and History
3. German and Jewish (western Ashkenazic): reduced fonn of Markus, German spelling of Marcus (see Mark 1).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In Russian, from Mark/Marx, with genitive -s
as a nameRussian Surnames
In German, Patronym zu Marcus oder zu einem Rufnamen mit ahd. marcha/altsächs. marca 'Grenze'; 2552 Belege; zeigt ck/ckh/gk-Variation nach n/l/r.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 2: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen II, Konsonantismus
In German, Verkürzte patronymische Form zu Marcus über Rufname Mark/Merk; Varianten mit hypokoristischem Umlaut; vereinzelt auch engl. Fremdname; 2938 Belege.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 6: Familiennamen aus Rufnamen
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)- Hertha Ayrtonb. 1854GBnot in their usual nameEnglish electrical engineer (1854–1923)
- Richard Marksb. 1943USAmerican film editor (1943-2018)
- Justin MarksUSAmerican screenwriter
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)58 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 33 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- How do you pronounce Marks?
- In English /mɑɹks/ (Wiktionary).
- What does the name Marks mean, and where does it come from?
- son of Mark, or a different form of Mark; also contracted form of German Markus Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Marks?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 49 thousand people named Marks, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled marks. After it come United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and Australia; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Marks most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Marks is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 704 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Marks?
- In the United States, the national register counted 49,177 people named Marks in 2010, about 1 in 6.8 thousand residents.
- How common is Marks compared with other names?
- In the United States, Marks is the 554th most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Marks?
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/marksThe 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, “Marks” — ranked 644th in the United States (Census Bureau, 2010). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.