Ripley
loc · Latin script
Meaning: person from Ripley; place-name meaning “woodland clearing in the form of a strip”
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ɹɪpli/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Ripley is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 36K(measured from records)
- DKDenmark1 in 367K
- ESSpain1 in 1.3M
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 Ripley 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
- 42 (measured from records)
- 1 in 36K (inferred from the name graph)
9,314 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Рипли in RU Russia.
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 Ripley; place-name meaning “woodland clearing in the form of a strip”
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Ripley 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.
9,314 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; DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form); DZS — Učestalost prezimena (Popis 2021); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames). 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)
Ripley 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, places, esp. one in W Yorks., so called from OE ripel strip of land + leak wood, clearing. Rimpier see Rumbold Rinaldelli see Reynold Ripoli Catalan: habitation name from a place in N Spain, the site of a famous medieval monastery, originally named with the L elements rwus stream (see Rieu) + pullus dark grey.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A surname from Old English.
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 Ripleyb. 1802USAmerican social reformer and Unitarian minister (1802–1880)
- William Zebina Ripleyb. 1867USAmerican academic (1867–1941)
- Robert Ripleyb. 1890USAmerican cartoonist (1890–1949)
- Arthur Ripleyb. 1897USAmerican screenwriter (1897–1961)
- Sidney Dillon Ripleyb. 1913USAmerican ornithologist and 8th Secretary of the Smithsonian (1913–2001)
- Alexandra Ripleyb. 1934USAmerican writer (1934-2004)
- Alice Ripleyb. 1963USAmerican actress, singer-songwriter
- Fay Ripleyb. 1966GBEnglish actress, television presenter, cookbook author
- Connor Ripleyb. 1993GBEnglish professional footballer (born 1993)
- Ben RipleyUSAmerican screenwriter
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 36 sources across 16 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 9.3K | #3,799 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 9K | #3,862 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 8.9K | #3,670 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 38 | #54,525 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 38 | #53,553 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 16 | #27,557 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 9 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 9 | #145,739 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 5 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 5 | #207,957 |
| 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
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- 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 Ripley mean, and where does it come from?
- person from Ripley; place-name meaning “woodland clearing in the form of a strip” Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Ripley have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 9.3 thousand people named Ripley, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Ripley most common?
- Ripley is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 36 thousand people carrying it.
- How do you pronounce Ripley?
- A machine transcription gives /ɹɪpli/ (IPA) for English.
- How common is the name Ripley?
- In the United States, the national register counted 9,314 people named Ripley in 2010, about 1 in 36 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Ripley?
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/ripleyThe 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, “Ripley”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.