Moorcroft
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Person from Moorcroft’, a place-name meaning ‘marshland smallholding’
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 4 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Moorcroft is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Africa than in any other country.
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 41Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 54K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 120Kfew records
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.
- South Africa (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 146 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 41K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,600 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
South Africa, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)‘Person from Moorcroft’, a place-name meaning ‘marshland smallholding’.
Cited for this meaning 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)Moorcroft 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZA South Africa | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 41K | — | Moorcroft | 44 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈1,300 est. | ≈1 in 54K | listed | Moorcroft | 146 |
| KE Kenya | ≈360 est. | ≈1 in 159K | — | Moorcroft | 1 |
| AU Australia | ≈230 est. | ≈1 in 121K | — | Moorcroft | 59 |
| US United States | 220 | 1 in 1.5M | 220 | Moorcroft | 142 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈28 est. | ≈1 in 192K | — | Moorcroft | 18 |
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: the hanks-dictionary-surnames-1988 register; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010. 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)Moorcroft is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, dweller at the croft on the moor; first attested Richard de Morcroft 1366 SRLa
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
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 Moorcroftb. 1767GB18th/19th-century English traveler
- Judy Moorcroftb. 1933GBcostume designer (1933-1991)
- William H. Moorcroftb. 1944psychotherapist (1944–)
- Dave Moorcroftb. 1947GBEnglish footballer (born 1947)
- Lois Moorcroftb. 1956CACanadian politician
- Gary Moorcroftb. 1976Australian rules footballer
- Nick Moorcroftb. 1979GBEnglish screenwriter
- Tara Moorcroftb. 1992GBbadminton player
- Alan MoorcroftBritish philatelist
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)13 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 220 | #85,049 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 219 | #90,519 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 174 | #96,918 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Moorcroft mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Person from Moorcroft’, a place-name meaning ‘marshland smallholding’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Moorcroft have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.6 thousand people named Moorcroft in South Africa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled moorcroft.
- How common is the name Moorcroft?
- In the United States, the national register counted 220 people named Moorcroft in 2010, about 1 in 1.5 million residents.
What do you want to know about Moorcroft?
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/moorcroftThe 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, “Moorcroft”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.