Urban
loc · Latin script
Meaning: from the medieval personal name Urban, based on Latin Urbanus, literally 'town-dweller'
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ɝbən/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Urban is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- CZCzechia1 in 1.4K(measured from records)
- SKSlovakia1 in 1.9K
- PLPoland1 in 2.1K
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.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 419 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.4K (inferred from the name graph)
20,058 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Czechia
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Urbán in GB United Kingdom.
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)
from the medieval personal name Urban, based on Latin Urbanus, literally 'town-dweller'
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 15 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Urban 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 20,058 | 1 in 17K | 20K | Urban | 419 |
| PL Poland | 18,329 | 1 in 2.1K | 9.2K | — | 5 |
| CZ Czechia | 7,605 | 1 in 1.4K | 7.6K | — | 3 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈3,000 est. | ≈1 in 22K | — | Urbán | 107 |
| SK Slovakia | 2,941 | 1 in 1.9K | 2.9K | — | 4 |
| AT Austria | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 5.7K | 39 | Urban | 82 |
| UY Uruguay | 220 | 1 in 15K | 220 | — | — |
20,058 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000; dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); MVČR — living population register 2017; naše jména — 2016 MVČR snapshot; JÚĽŠ SAV — Databáza priezvisk na Slovensku (surname database, 1995 census); INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public); Statistik Austria — STATatlas Vornamen WFS (per-name time series 1984–2024). 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)
Urban is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, Latin urbanus ‘of the city’; name of a 3rd-century saint and seven popes, used occasionally as a Christian name in the Middle Ages; first attested Vrbanus de Herlingdon’ 1197 P (Bk)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, Latin; city dweller; name of several early saints and popes
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
In Swedish, Urban är ett latinskt namn, som går tillbaka på ett binamn bildat till urbanus ’som hör till staden [dvs. Rom]; stadsbo’. I både den rikssvenska och finlandssvenska almanackan 25 maj, till minne av påven Urbanus i (död 230).
as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon
In Italian, var. dialetal set. de Urbano
as a nameDicionário dos sobrenomes italianos
In English, pope
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
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)
- Urban IIb. 1035FR11th century pope and initiator of the Crusades
- Urban IIIb. 1200ITpope (1185–1187)
- Urban Vb. 1310FRpope of the Catholic Church from 1362 to 1370
- Urban VIb. 1318ITpope of the Catholic Church from 1378 to 1389 (1318–1389)
- Urban VIIb. 1521ITpope of the Catholic Church in September 1590
- Urban VIIIb. 1568FR235 pope of the Catholic Church from 1623 to 1644 (1568–1644)
- Jan Urbanb. 1962PLPolish football manager and former player
- Keith Urbanb. 1967NZAustralian-American musician
- Damir Urbanb. 1968HRCroatian rock musician
- Karl Urbanb. 1972NZNew Zealand actor
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 78 sources across 41 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 20K | #1,630 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 20K | #1,790 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 19K | #1,851 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 9.2K | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 9.2K | #163 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 9.1K | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 9.1K | #163 |
| CZ Czechia | naše jména — 2016 MVČR snapshot | — | 7.6K | #55 |
| CZ Czechia | KdeJsme.cz — četnost jmen a příjmení (MVČR population register front-end) | — | 7.6K | #55 |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 7.6K | #57 |
| SK Slovakia | JÚĽŠ SAV — Databáza priezvisk na Slovensku (surname database, 1995 census) | 1995 | 2.9K | — |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 220 | — |
Reference works 10
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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
- Hoffman, Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings (2nd ed., 2012)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
- Kotík, Antonín, Naše příjmení (nové vydání, 1897)
- Søndergaard, Georg, Danske efternavne (Lademann 1984/1991)
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 Urban mean, and where does it come from?
- from the medieval personal name Urban, based on Latin Urbanus, literally 'town-dweller' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How common is the name Urban?
- In the United States, the national register counted 20,058 people named Urban in 2010, about 1 in 17 thousand residents.
- In which country does Urban have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 20 thousand people named Urban, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled urban.
- Where is Urban most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Urban is densest in Czechia — about 1 in 1.4 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How do you pronounce Urban?
- A machine transcription gives /ɝbən/ (IPA) for Hindi.
What do you want to know about Urban?
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/urbanThe 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, “Urban”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.