Olifant
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: An elephant
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Olifant is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 57Kas Oliphant(measured from records)
- SESweden1 in 928Kas Oliphant
- CHSwitzerland1 in 1.2Mas Oliphant
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Olifant 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
- 11 (measured from records)
- 1 in 57K (inferred from the name graph)
5,808 named Oliphant, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
United States, as Oliphant
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Oliphant in US United States.
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)
An elephant.
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 16 languages in the etymology graph.
How Olifant is read(measured from records)
Olifant is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English72%
An elephant.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Swahili9.7%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Olifant in Swahili.
- French5.1%
olifant (ivory horn)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Olifant 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 | 5,808as Oliphant | 1 in 57K | 5.8K | Oliphant | 11 |
| ES Spain | 13as Oliphant | 1 in 3.8M | 13 | — | — |
| SE Sweden | 11as Oliphant | 1 in 928K | 11 | — | — |
| PL Poland | 9as Oliphant | 1 in 4.3M | 6 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | 7as Oliphant | 1 in 1.2M | 7 | — | — |
| CZ Czechia | 4as Oliphant | 1 in 2.7M | 4 | — | — |
| CR Costa Rica | 3as Oliphant | 1 in 1.7M | 3 | — | — |
5,808 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; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); MVČR — living population register 2017; 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).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Olifant 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 Norwegian Nynorsk, oliphaunt
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Afrikaans, elephant
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Breton, ivoire, éléphant
as a wordDeshayes, Dictionnaire étymologique du breton (2003)
In Basque, Olifante. Olifantak oihusten deit / Ene llobaren herstüra . EE 1883a, 479 (trad. suletina del Cantar de Altabizkar, atribuida por Duvoisin a Inchauspe) .
as a wordOrotariko Euskal Hiztegia (OEH) — General/Historical Basque Dictionary, Euskaltzaindia
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.
Evidence(measured from records)
No register attests this spelling yet
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Olifant mean, and where does it come from?
- An elephant. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- In which country does Olifant have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 5.8 thousand people named Oliphant, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Olifant most common?
- No national register we hold counts the spelling Olifant itself. The densest figure for its family of spellings is United States's: the national register counts about 1 in 57 thousand people named Oliphant.
- How common is the name Olifant?
- In the United States, the national register counted 5,808 people named Oliphant in 2010, about 1 in 57 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Olifant?
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/olifantThe 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, “Olifant”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.