Mitford
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘person from Mitford’, Northumberland, meaning ‘ford at a confluence’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/mʲitfəd/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Mitford is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- AUAustralia
- ZASouth Africa
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.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘person from Mitford’, Northumberland, meaning ‘ford at a confluence’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
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)
Mitford is also recorded in 3 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 Mitford, Northumberland; first attested John de Midford 1196 P (Du)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Ford. A family of this name, holding the title Baron Redes dale, trace their descent from Sir John Mitford (d. /409) of Mitford, Northumb. He was granted lands by the Earl of Atholl in ij6g. His descendants in the 20th cent, included the Mitford sisters, one of whom was the novelist Nancy Mitford. The first Baron Redesdale ,John FreemanMitford (17 48-1830), was Lord Chancellor of Ireland.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, Northumb., so called from OE (gejmyQe confluence + ford Ford. Mitic see Dmitriev Var.: It.: Amiranda. Mirfield see Merrifield
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
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)
- William Mitfordb. 1744GBBritish historian and politician (1744–1827)
- Charles Mitfordb. 1785English cricketer (1785-1831)
- Mary Russell Mitfordb. 1787GBEnglish author and dramatist (1787–1855)
- William Townley Mitfordb. 1817GBBritish politician (1817-1889)
- Algernon Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdaleb. 1837GBBritish noble, diplomat, collector, and writer (1837-1916)
- Nancy Mitfordb. 1904GBBritish writer
- Pamela Mitfordb. 1907GBBritish socialite (1907–1994)
- Diana Mosleyb. 1910GBnot in their usual nameBritish fascist, writer and editor (1910–2003)
- Unity Mitfordb. 1914GBEnglish socialite best known as a devotee of Adolf Hitler
- Jessica Mitfordb. 1917GBBritish writer (1917–1996)
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)
Attested in 6 sources across 3 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 Mitford mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘person from Mitford’, Northumberland, meaning ‘ford at a confluence’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Mitford?
- A machine transcription gives /mʲitfəd/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Mitford have the most bearers?
- Mitford is most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
What do you want to know about Mitford?
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/mitfordThe 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, “Mitford”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.