Moorhead
loc · Latin script
Meaning: variant of Muirhead
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Moorhead is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- CHSwitzerland1 in 2.8M(measured from records)
- CRCosta Rica1 in 5.1M
- USUnited States1 in 69Kas Moorehead
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Moorhead itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 8 (measured from records)
- 1 in 2.8M (inferred from the name graph)
4,791 named Moorehead, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Switzerland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Moorehead in US United States and Мурхед in RU Russia.
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.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
variant of Muirhead.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Where in the world(measured from records)
Moorhead 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 | 4,791as Moorehead | 1 in 69K | 4.8K | Moorehead | 8 |
| CH Switzerland | 3 | 1 in 2.8M | 3 | — | — |
| RU Russia | ≈1 est. | ≈1 in 132M | — | Мурхед | 5 |
| CR Costa Rica | 1 | 1 in 5.1M | 1 | — | — |
| EE Estonia | — | — | listed | — | — |
4,791 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; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names. 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).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Scipio Moorheadb. 1750USAmerican artist
- James K. Moorheadb. 1806USAmerican politician (1806–1884)
- John Moorhead Jr.b. 1859USAmerican football player (1859–1927)
- Alice Moorheadb. 1868GBScottish physician
- Ethel Moorheadb. 1869GBBritish suffragette and painter (1869-1955)
- Natalie Moorheadb. 1901USAmerican actress (1901–1992)
- Carlos Moorheadb. 1922USAmerican politician (1922–2011)
- William S. Moorheadb. 1923USAmerican politician (1923–1987)
- Jean Moorheadb. 1935USAmerican actress
- Aaron Moorheadb. 1987UScinematographer
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 12 sources across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 4.4K | #6,992 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 4.3K | #7,666 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 4.1K | #7,770 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 3 | #154,370 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 1 | #30,029 |
| 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
- 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 Moorhead mean, and where does it come from?
- variant of Muirhead. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Moorhead have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 4.8 thousand people named Moorehead, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Moorhead most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Moorhead is densest in Switzerland — about 1 in 2.8 million people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Moorhead?
- In Switzerland, the national register counted 3 people named Moorhead in 2024, about 1 in 2.8 million residents.
What do you want to know about Moorhead?
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/moorheadThe 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, “Moorhead”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.