Rolf

given name · Latin script

Meaning, in German: from Rudolf, from *hruod- 'fame' + *wulf- 'wolf'

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/ʁɔlf/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Rolf is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country, where it is the 78th most common given name.

rarermore common
  • SESweden1 in 234(measured from records)
  • DEGermany≈1 in 368
  • NONorway1 in 519

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 Rolf 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)

≈220,000 people, est.

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
294 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 234 (inferred from the name graph)

Sweden

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

RolfLatin(measured from records)
РольфCyrillic(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)

From the male personal name Rolf, from Old Norse Hrolfr meaning 'fame-wolf', later reinforced by Norman Roul.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 10 languages in the etymology graph.

How Rolf is read(measured from records)

Rolf is one spelling over 2 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.

  • German71%

    from Rudolf, from *hruod- 'fame' + *wulf- 'wolf'

    as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung

    German surname type; plate shows vowel variation in spellings Rolf/Rölf/Rohlf/Roolf/Roelf. Bearer counts: Rolf 3560, Rölf 201, Rohlf 2110, Roolf 191, Roelf 143.

    as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus

    Surname map showing vowel-length variation: short o versus oo/oh; distribution of the forms in Germany.

    as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus

  • English11%

    From the male personal name Rolf, from Old Norse Hrolfr meaning 'fame-wolf', later reinforced by Norman Roul.

    as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

    from the personal name Rolf, probably from Old Norse Hrólfr; first attested Rolf 1066 DB

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

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)

Rolf 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.

Where Rolf is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
DE Germany#78≈220,000 est.≈1 in 368—Rolf240
SE Sweden#12943,5821 in 23444KRolf123
CH Switzerland#21≈14,000 est.≈1 in 59410Rolf142
NO Norway#8010,5361 in 51929KRolf122
NL Netherlands#4243,956as Roelf1 in 4.4K3.9KRolf99
FI Finland#7151,8031 in 3.1K4.5KRolf32

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: Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Rolf is also recorded as 6 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish given name6 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Brazil, Switzerland, United States, Spain

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Rol'F, Rólf

  • French given name3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, Switzerland, Congo - Kinshasa, United States

    Also written Rol'F

  • Polish given name2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Poland, Switzerland, United States, Sweden

    Also written Rol'F

  • Czech given name3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Czechia, Slovakia, Switzerland, Sweden

    Languages: Czech, Slovak

    Also written Rol'F

  • Croatian given name13 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Croatia, Switzerland, Norway, United States

    Languages: Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian

    Also written Rol'F, Ролф

  • Swahili given name2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, South Africa, Switzerland, Congo - Kinshasa

    Also written Rol'F

64 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Rolf is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Irish, Germanic ‘fame wolf’; used in medieval Ireland, now rare or obsolete.

    as a nameIrish first 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)

18501900195020002050Rolf Nevanlinna, b. 1895Rolf Maximilian Sievert, b. 1896Rolf Hochhuth, b. 1931Ivan Rebroff, b. 1931Rolf Zinkernagel, b. 1944Peter Stormare, b. 1953Rolf Saxon, b. 1955Oliver Kahn, b. 1969Prince Ernst August of Hanover, b. 1983Jacob Sartorius, b. 2002

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)

InformalHallo Rolf,Hi Rolf, (English)

A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 74 sources across 32 countries.

Official registers attesting Rolf
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—44K#92
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—29K#144
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)202023K—
NO NorwaySSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891)202511K—
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)—4.5K#326
NL NetherlandsMeertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017)—2.5K#1,209
FI FinlandDVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register)—1.8K—
FI FinlandDVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup)—10#38,302
NO NorwaySSB — Navn (1880–present)20256—
NO NorwaySSB — Navn (1880–present)1944——

Reference works 6

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

Where does the name Rolf come from?
From the male personal name Rolf, from Old Norse Hrolfr meaning 'fame-wolf', later reinforced by Norman Roul. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
Is Rolf a male or female name?
Rolf is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
In which country does Rolf have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 218 thousand people named Rolf in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled rolf.
Where is Rolf most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Rolf is densest in Sweden — about 1 in 234 people — even though Germany holds more of our records for it.
How do you pronounce Rolf?
A machine transcription gives /ʁɔlf/ (IPA) for German.
What does the name Rolf mean?
In German, from Rudolf, from *hruod- 'fame' + *wulf- 'wolf'
What are other forms of the name Rolf?
In the etymology graph, Rodolfo, Rudolf and Rudolph are forms of the same name in other languages.
How common is the name Rolf?
In Sweden, the national register counted 43,582 people named Rolf, about 1 in 234 residents.
How common is Rolf compared with other names?
In Germany, Rolf is the 78th most common given name of 156,202 given names recorded there.

What do you want to know about Rolf?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/rolf

The 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, “Rolf” — the 78th most common given name in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Rolf parses inside a full name →