Oester
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Toponymischer Familienname zu Öster/Oester; Wohnstättenname
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 4 countries · latest register: BFS, 2024
Oester is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Sweden than in any other country.
- CHSwitzerland1 in 17K(measured from records)
- DEGermany≈1 in 560Kfew records
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 950Kfew records
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 Oester itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. 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.
- Sweden (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 103 (measured from records)
- 1 in 17K (inferred from the name graph)
1,055 named Öster
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Switzerland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Øster in DK Denmark, NO Norway and Öster in SE Sweden.
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)Toponymischer Familienname zu Öster/Oester; Wohnstättenname.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Deutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Oester 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SE Sweden | 1,055as Öster | 1 in 9.7K | 1.1K | Öster | 9 |
| FI Finland | 625as Öster | 1 in 8.9K | 625 | — | 2 |
| CH Switzerland | 492 | 1 in 17K | 492 | Oester | 28 |
| DK Denmark | 361as Øster | 1 in 16K | 361 | Øster | 33 |
| US United States | 207 | 1 in 1.6M | 284 | Oester | 103 |
| NO Norway | 64as Øster | 1 in 85K | 64 | Øster | 6 |
1,055 people counted by Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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)Oester 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 Dutch, oyster (mollusc of the family Ostreidae)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)- Ron Oesterb. 1956USAmerican baseball player
- Marlies Oesterb. 1976CHSwiss alpine skier
- Robin Oesterb. 1999CHSwiss athletics competitor (born 1999)
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)8 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 492 | #2,620 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 284 | #73,555 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 240 | #74,957 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 207 | #89,403 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 1
- 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 Oester mean?
- Recorded meaning: Toponymischer Familienname zu Öster/Oester; Wohnstättenname.
- In which country does Oester have the most bearers?
- In Sweden, the national register counted about 1.1 thousand people named Öster, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Oester most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Oester is densest in Switzerland — about 1 in 17 thousand people — even though Sweden holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Oester?
- In Switzerland, the national register counted 492 people named Oester in 2024, about 1 in 17 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Oester?
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/oesterThe 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, “Oester”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.