Shelford
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from Shelford (Cambridgeshire, Nottinghamshire), or Shelford House in Burton Hastings (Warwickshire); first attested John de Shelford 1220 SPleas (Herts)
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Shelford is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- USUnited States
- NZNew Zealand
- AUAustralia
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from Shelford (Cambridgeshire, Nottinghamshire), or Shelford House in Burton Hastings (Warwickshire); first attested John de Shelford 1220 SPleas (Herts)
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
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)
Shelford 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 English, A rural locality in Golden Plains Shire, Victoria, Australia.
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)
- Leonard Shelfordb. 1795English legal writer
- William Shelfordb. 1834English civil engineer
- Robert Walter Campbell Shelfordb. 1872MYBritish entomologist (1872–1912)
- Victor Ernest Shelfordb. 1877USAmerican zoologist and ecologist (1877–1968)
- Frank Shelfordb. 1955NZNew Zealand rugby union player
- Buck Shelfordb. 1957NZNew Zealand rugby union footballer and coach
- Darrall Shelfordb. 1962NZNew Zealand rugby union footballer and coach, and rugby league footballer and coach
- Kelly Shelfordb. 1966NZNew Zealand rugby footballer and coach
- Exia Edwardsb. 1975NZnot in their usual nameNew Zealand rugby union and rugby league footballer, and netball player
- Angus Shelfordb. 1976NZNew Zealand boxer
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 10 sources across 5 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 347 | #14,812 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 110 | #139,757 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 109 | #150,205 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 109 | #150,452 |
| KN St. Kitts & Nevis | St Kitts & Nevis — Register of Electors 2026 | 2026 | 3 | #179 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 1 | #206,266 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 Shelford mean, and where does it come from?
- from Shelford (Cambridgeshire, Nottinghamshire), or Shelford House in Burton Hastings (Warwickshire); first attested John de Shelford 1220 SPleas (Herts) Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- In which country does Shelford have the most bearers?
- Shelford is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Shelford?
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/shelfordThe 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, “Shelford”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.