Sutcliffe

surname · Latin script

Meaning: ‘person from Sutcliffe’, Yorkshire, literally ‘southern cliff or riverbank’

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

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

Sutcliffe is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 152K(measured from records)
  • NONorway1 in 304K
  • CHSwitzerland1 in 365K

carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

2,193 people, 2010

Sources
39 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 152K (inferred from the name graph)

United States

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

‘person from Sutcliffe’, Yorkshire, literally ‘southern cliff or riverbank’.

Sources 1

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

Where in the world(measured from records)

Sutcliffe 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 Sutcliffe is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States2,1931 in 152K2.2KSutcliffe36
ES Spain781 in 641K78Sutcliffe10
PL Poland241 in 1.6M15——
CH Switzerland231 in 365K23—1
NO Norway181 in 304K18——
DK Denmark151 in 391K15——

2,193 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; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Sutcliffe is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Russian surname7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United Kingdom, Russia, United States

    Languages: Russian, Ukrainian

    Also written Сатклифф, Satkliff, Саткліфф

  • Czech surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Czechia, United Kingdom, United States, Slovakia

    Languages: Czech, Slovak

    Also written Sütcliffe

41 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)

Sutcliffe 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 in W Yorks, so called from OE sud South + clif riverbank, slope, cliff (see Clive). Var.: Sutcliff. Sutherland Scots: regional name from the former county of this name, so called from ON sudroen southern + land land; the territory was so named because it lay south of Scandinavia and the earlier Norse colonies in the Orkney and Shetland Islands. Vars.: Southerland, Sutherlan.

    as a nameA dictionary of surnames

  • 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)

1850190019502000Francis Meadow Sutcliffe, b. 1853Herbert Sutcliffe, b. 1894Thelma Sutcliffe, b. 1906Bert Sutcliffe, b. 1923Stuart Sutcliffe, b. 1940Serena Sutcliffe, b. 1945Peter Sutcliffe, b. 1946Mark Sutcliffe, b. 1968David Sutcliffe, b. 1969William Sutcliffe, b. 1971

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)

FormalDear Sutcliffe,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 23 sources across 13 countries.

Official registers attesting Sutcliffe
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020102.2K#13,790
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020002.1K#13,064
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020202.1K#13,676
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—78#32,973
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—78#32,674
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)202423#33,003
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—18#43,915
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)202615—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—15#107,969
DK DenmarkDanmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts)—15#29,709
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames)20269—
PL Polanddane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names)—9#147,580

Reference works 4

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • 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 Sutcliffe mean, and where does it come from?
‘person from Sutcliffe’, Yorkshire, literally ‘southern cliff or riverbank’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Sutcliffe?
A machine transcription gives /ˈsətkɫɪf/ (IPA) for English.
In which country does Sutcliffe have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 2.2 thousand people named Sutcliffe, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sutcliffe.
Where is Sutcliffe most common?
Sutcliffe is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 152 thousand people carrying it.
How common is the name Sutcliffe?
In the United States, the national register counted 2,193 people named Sutcliffe in 2010, about 1 in 152 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about Sutcliffe?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

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

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, “Sutcliffe”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Sutcliffe parses inside a full name →