Spielberg

Locally spelled שפילברג in IL Israel.

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.

Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.

Spielberg 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.

• English70%

  (i) ‘person from Spielberg’, various places in Germany, from ‘look-out mountain’; (ii) an invented Jewish name based on German Spiel ‘play’ + Berg ‘mountain’.

  as a name·Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

  Steven, US film maker

  as a name·Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

• German13%

  name from any of the various places so called, from a con¬ tracted form of MHG Spiegel look-out point (L speculum-, cf. Spiegler) + berg hill. Vars.: Spelar, Spel(l)man.

  as a name·The Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles

  Spielberg (a municipality of Styria, Austria)

  as a word·kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

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 We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.

Spielberg 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 Croatian, američki filmski redatelj i producent; ostvario filmove s fascinantnim vizualnim efektima ( Bliski susreti treće vrste , Jurassic Park ) kao i filmove najviših umjetničkih dosega ( Schindlerova lista ); rezultat njegova zabavljačkog i umjetničkog talenta je film E.T. , vanzemaljac , spoj masovne prijemljivosti i stilskog majstorstva

  as a word·Hrvatski jezični portal (HJP) dictionary export

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.

• Steven Spielbergb. 1946USAmerican filmmaker (born 1946)
• Kate Capshawb. 1953USnot in their usual nameAmerican actress who converted to Judaism
• Sasha Spielbergb. 1990USAmerican actress and singer

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).

14 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 7 countries.

Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.

What does the name Spielberg mean, and where does it come from?

(i) ‘person from Spielberg’, various places in Germany, from ‘look-out mountain’; (ii) an invented Jewish name based on German Spiel ‘play’ + Berg ‘mountain’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].

Which countries have the most people with the surname Spielberg?

In the United States, the national register counted about 387 people named Spielberg, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled spielberg. After it come Israel, Argentina, Denmark and Switzerland; the country table on this page ranks them.

Where is Spielberg most common?

Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Spielberg is densest in Denmark — about 1 in 838 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.

How common is the name Spielberg?

In the United States, the national register counted 387 people named Spielberg in 2010, about 1 in 860 thousand residents.