Swist
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Swist is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the Sudan than in any other country. Recorded meaning: Borrowed from Polish Świst.
- USUnited States1 in 825K(measured from records)
- PLPoland1 in 27K
- SDSudan≈1 in 32K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Sudan (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 125 (measured from records)
- 1 in 27K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,400 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Poland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Borrowed from Polish Świst.
Sources 1
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Swist 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SD Sudan | ≈1,400 est. | ≈1 in 32K | — | Swist | 1 |
| PL Poland | 1,413 | 1 in 27K | 739 | Swist | 25 |
| US United States | 403 | 1 in 825K | 403 | Swist | 125 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈160 est. | ≈1 in 416K | — | Swist | 20 |
| DE Germany | ≈99 est. | ≈1 in 806K | — | Swist | 38 |
| CA Canada | ≈69 est. | ≈1 in 547K | — | Swist | 27 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈16 est. | ≈1 in 301K | — | Swist | 1 |
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; 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 recorded senses(measured from records)
Swist 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 German, a brook running west of Bonn in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
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)
- Wally Swistb. 1953USAmerican poet
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 12 sources across 5 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 403 | #51,610 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 386 | #50,801 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 377 | #58,182 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 7 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 7 | #170,505 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 5 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 5 | #210,859 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 Swist mean, and where does it come from?
- Borrowed from Polish Świst. Recorded by Wiktionary.
- In which country does Swist have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.4 thousand people named Swist in the Sudan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled swist.
- Where is Swist most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Swist is densest in Poland — about 1 in 27 thousand people — even though Sudan holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Swist?
- In Poland, the national register counted 1,413 people named Swist in 2026, about 1 in 27 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Swist?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/swistThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use; a free API key gives 1,000 requests a day, and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Swist”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.