Oberst
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from a simple topographic designation 'uppermost' (Deutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 11 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
/oβeɾst/(machine-generated) Spanish · model-generated
Oberst is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
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 Oberst
- Spanish:/oβeɾst/(machine-generated) model-generated
Readings marked model-generated were transcribed by a model; the others are quoted from the dictionary named.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)from a simple topographic designation 'uppermost'
Cited for this meaning 1
- Deutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Oberst counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
| Country | Most common spelling | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 1.3K | — |
| AR Argentina | — | 260 | — |
| BR Brazil | — | 100 | — |
| GB United Kingdom | — | 21 | — |
| ES Spain | — | 12 | — |
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; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos). 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)Oberst is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In German, Toponymic surname from a higher/upper place or dwelling; 723 bearer tokens.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte
In German, Toponymic surname from a dwelling/landscape feature; bearer count 723.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte
In German, colonel
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In German, military rank name from 'colonel'
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
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)- Maximilian Oberstb. 1849DEGerman physician (1849–1925)
- Bill Oberst, Jr.b. 1965USAmerican actor
- Conor Oberstb. 1980USAmerican musician
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)21 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 11 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Oberst mean, and where does it come from?
- from a simple topographic designation 'uppermost' Recorded by Deutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung.
- How do you pronounce Oberst?
- In Spanish /oβeɾst/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- In which country does Oberst have the most bearers?
- Oberst is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Oberst?
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/oberstThe 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, “Oberst” — ranked 19890th in the United States (Census Bureau). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.