Orton
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Person from Orton’, from various English and Scottish place-names with senses like ‘farmstead by/on a hill’, ‘higher farmstead’, ‘farmstead by a river bank’, and ‘edge of the fortress’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Orton is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 50K(measured from records)
- FIFinland1 in 265K
- SESweden1 in 600K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 151 (measured from records)
- 1 in 50K (inferred from the name graph)
6,720 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘Person from Orton’, from various English and Scottish place-names with senses like ‘farmstead by/on a hill’, ‘higher farmstead’, ‘farmstead by a river bank’, and ‘edge of the fortress’.
Sources 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)
Orton 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.
6,720 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; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Brasil.IO genero-nomes (IBGE Censo 2010 mirror, CC-BY-SA); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts). 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)
Orton is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from Orton (Cumberland) or Nether/Over Worton (Oxfordshire), and from several Overton/Orton places; first attested Æðelweard of Ortun c1051 OEByn
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, various places so called. All those in England share a sec¬ ond element from OE tiin enclosure, settlement, but the first element in each case is more difficult to determine. Examples in Cambs. and Warwicks, are on the banks of 467 Oseletti see Uccello O’Serie see Seerey Oserovitch see Osher O’Sesnane Oswald O’Sesnane see Sexton O’Spallane see Spillane
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, Joe, British playwright
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, river, Peru, Bolivia
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Esperanto, accusative singular of orto
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)
- George Ortonb. 1873CACanadian athlete (1873-1958)
- Bob Ortonb. 1929USAmerican professional wrestler (1929–2006)
- Joe Ortonb. 1933GBEnglish playwright (1933–1967)
- Bill Ortonb. 1948USAmerican politician (1948-2009)
- Bob Orton Jr.b. 1950USAmerican professional wrestler (born 1950)
- Beth Ortonb. 1970GBBritish folktronica indie-pop singer-songwriter
- Randy Ortonb. 1980USAmerican professional wrestler (born 1980)
- Mark Ortonb. 1982USAmerican composer and musician
- Kyle Ortonb. 1982USAmerican football quarterback
- Daniel Ortonb. 1990USAmerican basketball player (born 1990)
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 34 sources across 17 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 6.7K | #5,201 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 6.4K | #5,291 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 6.2K | #5,154 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 34 | #58,735 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 34 | #57,670 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 28 | #156,028 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 21 | #42,117 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 17 | #28,867 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 11 | #67,131 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 7 | #50,001 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- 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)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 Orton mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Person from Orton’, from various English and Scottish place-names with senses like ‘farmstead by/on a hill’, ‘higher farmstead’, ‘farmstead by a river bank’, and ‘edge of the fortress’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Orton have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 6.7 thousand people named Orton, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled orton.
- Where is Orton most common?
- Orton is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 50 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Orton?
- In the United States, the national register counted 6,720 people named Orton in 2010, about 1 in 50 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Orton?
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/ortonThe 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, “Orton”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.