Svendsen
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: ‘son of Sven’, from a Danish and Norwegian male personal name, from Old Norse Sveinn ‘boy’ or ‘servant’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ˈsvɛndsən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Svendsen is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Norway than in any other country, where it is the 26th most common surname.
- NONorway1 in 296(measured from records)
- DKDenmark1 in 540
- USUnited States1 in 127Kas Swensen
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 Svendsen 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.
- Norway (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 291 (measured from records)
- 1 in 296 (inferred from the name graph)
18,446 people
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Norway
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Swensen in US United States, TC Turks & Caicos Islands.
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)
‘son of Sven’, from a Danish and Norwegian male personal name, from Old Norse Sveinn ‘boy’ or ‘servant’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
How Svendsen is read(measured from records)
Svendsen is one spelling over 3 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.
- English38%
‘son of Sven’, from a Danish and Norwegian male personal name, from Old Norse Sveinn ‘boy’ or ‘servant’.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
- Danish30%
a surname originating as a patronymic
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
- Norwegian18%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Svendsen in Norwegian.
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)
Svendsen 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NO Norway | #26 | 18,446 | 1 in 296 | 18K | Svendsen | 114 |
| DK Denmark | #49 | 10,861 | 1 in 540 | 11K | Svendsen | 154 |
| US United States | — | 2,627as Swensen | 1 in 127K | 2.6K | Swensen | 291 |
| GH Ghana | — | ≈670 est. | ≈1 in 44K | — | Svendsen | 5 |
| SE Sweden | — | 532 | 1 in 19K | 532 | Svendsen | 36 |
| GL Greenland | — | 158 | 1 in 365 | 158 | — | 6 |
| TC Turks & Caicos Islands | #49 | ≈18 est. | ≈1 in 3.1K | — | Swensen | 1 |
18,446 people counted by SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Statistics Greenland — Surnames (NAXT1). 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).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Johan Svendsenb. 1840NONorwegian composer and conductor (1840–1911)
- Julius Svendsenb. 1919USanimator
- Poul Svendsenb. 1927DKDanish rower (1927–2024)
- Birgitte Victoria Svendsenb. 1957NONorwegian actress
- Lotte Svendsenb. 1968DKDanish film director
- Lars Svendsenb. 1970NONorwegian philosopher
- Emil Hegle Svendsenb. 1985NONorwegian biathlete
- Anna Svendsenb. 1990NONorwegian cross-country skier
- Oskar Svendsenb. 1994NONorwegian bicycle racer
- Victor Svendsenb. 1995DKbadminton player
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 30 sources across 18 countries.
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 Svendsen mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘son of Sven’, from a Danish and Norwegian male personal name, from Old Norse Sveinn ‘boy’ or ‘servant’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Svendsen?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈsvɛndsən/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Svendsen have the most bearers?
- In Norway, the national register counted about 18 thousand people named Svendsen, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled svendsen.
- Where is Svendsen most common?
- Svendsen is densest in Norway, where the national register counts about 1 in 296 people carrying it.
- How common is the name Svendsen?
- In Norway, the national register counted 18,446 people named Svendsen, about 1 in 296 residents.
- How common is Svendsen compared with other names?
- In Norway, Svendsen is the 26th most common surname of 90,139 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Svendsen?
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/svendsenThe 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, “Svendsen” — the 26th most common surname in Norway. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.