Petre
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: From the male personal name Peter, from Greek Petros, literally ‘rock’, translating Aramaic kefa ‘rock’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/piːtə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Petre is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country, where it is the 6th most common given name.
- HUHungary1 in 72as Péter(measured from records)
- SESweden1 in 90as Peter
- DEGermany≈1 in 94as Peter
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 Petre 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.
- Germany (inferred from the name graph)
- #109 (measured from records)
- 4 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 662 (measured from records)
- 1 in 72 (inferred from the name graph)
≈850,000 named Peter, est.
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Hungary, as Péter
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Peter in US United States, GB United Kingdom, DE Germany and 6 more.
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)
From the male personal name Peter, from Greek Petros, literally ‘rock’, translating Aramaic kefa ‘rock’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 18 languages in the etymology graph.
How Petre is read(measured from records)
Petre is one spelling over 4 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.
- English38%
From the male personal name Peter, from Greek Petros, literally ‘rock’, translating Aramaic kefa ‘rock’.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
A surname transferred from the given name.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Romanian20%
a male given name from Ancient Greek
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- French18%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Petre in French.
- Spanish11%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Petre in Spanish.
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)
Petre 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DE Germany | #6 | ≈850,000 est. | ≈1 in 94 | listed | Peter | 350 |
| NG Nigeria | #22 | ≈760,000 est. | ≈1 in 281 | — | Peter | 171 |
| US United States | #77 | 464,396as Peter | 1 in 716 | 464K | Peter | 662 |
| GB United Kingdom | #20 | ≈350,000 est. | ≈1 in 190 | 7 | Peter | 465 |
| AU Australia | #9 | ≈170,000 est. | ≈1 in 146 | 4 | Peter | 391 |
| HU Hungary | #4 | 135,685as Péter | 1 in 72 | 136K | Peter | 237 |
| SE Sweden | #18 | 112,872as Peter | 1 in 90 | 113K | Peter | 196 |
| AT Austria | #8 | ≈64,000 est. | ≈1 in 139 | 9.6K | Peter | 218 |
| DK Denmark | #2 | 45,777as Peter | 1 in 128 | 46K | Peter | 253 |
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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Australian national given names (aggregated state BDM); Nyilvántartó — Top-100 given names in population (2020–2025); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Statistik Austria — STATatlas Vornamen WFS (per-name time series 1984–2024). 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)
Petre is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Lithuanian, locative singular of Pẽtras (“Peter”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Latin, vocative singular of Petrus
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)
- Henry Petreb. 1820New Zealand politician (1820–1889)
- Francis Petreb. 1847NZNew Zealand architect (1847-1918)
- Joan Turville-Petreb. 1911GBEnglish philologist
- Maria Petreb. 1951RORomanian politician
- Will Adamsb. 1963GBnot in their usual nameBritish journalist and writer
- Florentin Petreb. 1976RORomanian footballer
- Mihai Petreb. 1979RORomanian dancer
- Cristian Petreb. 1979RORomanian rugby union player
- Dorotheea Petreb. 1981ROFilm actress
- Esthera Petreb. 1990ROhigh jumper
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)
Attested in 60 sources across 31 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.8K | #15,465 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.5K | #17,170 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.5K | #18,478 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 37 | #13,843 |
Reference works 7
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
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 Petre mean, and where does it come from?
- From the male personal name Peter, from Greek Petros, literally ‘rock’, translating Aramaic kefa ‘rock’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- What are other forms of the name Petre?
- In the etymology graph, Peer, Petri and Pero are forms of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Petre?
- A machine transcription gives /piːtə/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Petre have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 853 thousand people named Peter in Germany, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Petre most common?
- No national register we hold counts the spelling Petre itself. The densest figure for its family of spellings is Hungary's: the national register counts about 1 in 72 people named Péter.
- How common is the name Petre?
- In the United States, the national register counted 464,396 people named Peter in 2020, about 1 in 716 residents.
- How common is Petre compared with other names?
- In Germany, Petre is the 6th most common given name of 156,202 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Petre?
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/petreThe 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, “Petre” — the 6th most common given name in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.