Ramsey
surname · Latin script
Meaning: person from Ramsey, Cambridgeshire/Essex, or Ramsey, Dumfries and Galloway; 'island where wild garlic grows' / 'Ramm’s island'
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Ramsey is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 3.9K(inferred from the name graph)
- SGSingapore≈1 in 4K
- USUnited States1 in 4.2K
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 Ramsey 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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 518 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 2.4K (inferred from the name graph)
≈410,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Iceland, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
person from Ramsey, Cambridgeshire/Essex, or Ramsey, Dumfries and Galloway; 'island where wild garlic grows' / 'Ramm’s island'
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Ramsey 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈410,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.4K | — | Ramsey | 17 |
| US United States | #353 | 78,350 | 1 in 4.2K | 78K | Ramsey | 518 |
| MM Myanmar (Burma) | #797 | ≈14,000 est. | ≈1 in 4K | — | Ramsey | 5 |
| GB United Kingdom | #503 | ≈14,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.8K | 6.9K | Ramsey | 215 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈8,800 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Ramsey | 23 |
| SG Singapore | #298 | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 4K | — | Ramsey | 17 |
| NZ New Zealand | #396 | ≈1,300 est. | ≈1 in 3.9K | — | Ramsey | 65 |
| GY Guyana | — | 248as Ramsay | 1 in 3K | 248 | — | 4 |
| IS Iceland | #394 | ≈140 est. | ≈1 in 2.4K | listed | Ramsey | 4 |
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; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)
Ramsey 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 English, Any of a number of places, including:
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Norman R, Jr., US physicist (Nobel
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
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)
- Frank Ramseyb. 1903GBBritish mathematician, philosopher, and economist (1903–1930)
- Norman Foster Ramseyb. 1915USAmerican physicist (1915–2011)
- Alf Ramseyb. 1920GBEnglish association football player and manager (1920-1999)
- Anne Ramseyb. 1929USAmerican actress (1929-1988)
- Peter Ramseyb. 1962USAmerican film director
- David Ramseyb. 1971USAmerican actor
- Laura Ramseyb. 1982USAmerican actress
- Aaron Ramseyb. 1990GBWelsh association football player (born 1990)
- JonBenét Ramseyb. 1990USAmerican victim and beauty pageant contestant
- Bella Ramseyb. 2003GBBritish actor
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 55 sources across 30 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 78K | #412 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 77K | #373 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 75K | #434 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 20 | #605 |
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 given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Ramsey mean, and where does it come from?
- person from Ramsey, Cambridgeshire/Essex, or Ramsey, Dumfries and Galloway; 'island where wild garlic grows' / 'Ramm’s island' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Ramsey have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 407 thousand people named Ramsey in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled ramsey.
- How common is the name Ramsey?
- In the United States, the national register counted 78,350 people named Ramsey in 2010, about 1 in 4.2 thousand residents.
- How common is Ramsey compared with other names?
- In Singapore, Ramsey is the 298th most common surname of 78,292 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Ramsey?
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/ramseyThe 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, “Ramsey” — the 298th most common surname in Singapore. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.