Whittier
loc · Latin script
Meaning: ‘White-leather tawer’—someone who makes high-quality thin soft pale-coloured leather using alum and salt (Middle English whit ‘white’ + tawier ‘tawer’)
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Whittier is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- USUnited States
- CACanada
- CLChile
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘White-leather tawer’—someone who makes high-quality thin soft pale-coloured leather using alum and salt (Middle English whit ‘white’ + tawier ‘tawer’).
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
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)
Whittier 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, ‘whiteleather dresser’; from OE hwīt ‘white’ + ME tawyere/towyere/tewere; first attested Ralf Wittauuere 12th AD ii (Nth).
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, dresser, from ME whit White + taw(i)er Tawyer (cf. Weissgerber). Vars.: Whit(t)ear, Whit(e)hair, Whithear. Whittingham Wieczorek
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
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)
- Ruth Whittier Shuteb. 1803USAmerican painter (1803–1882)
- John Greenleaf Whittierb. 1807USAmerican Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery (1807-1892)
- Pauline Whittierb. 1876USAmateur golfer (1876–1946)
- Greenleaf Whittier Pickardb. 1877USAmerican radio pioneer (1877–1956)
- Harry Whittier Freesb. 1879USAmerican photographer (1879–1953)
- Francis Whittier Pennellb. 1886USU.S. botanist (1886–1952)
- Sumner Gage Whittierb. 1911USAmerican politician from Massachusetts (1911-2010)
- Caryl Chessmanb. 1921USnot in their usual nameAmerican convicted robber, kidnapper, rapist and writer (1921–1960)
- Jack Barnesb. 1940USnot in their usual nameAmerican politician
- Susan Bottomlyb. 1948USnot in their usual nameAmerican actress and model
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 10 sources across 5 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.6K | #12,047 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.5K | #11,696 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.4K | #12,379 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 8 | #167,220 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 1 | #29,846 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 Whittier mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘White-leather tawer’—someone who makes high-quality thin soft pale-coloured leather using alum and salt (Middle English whit ‘white’ + tawier ‘tawer’). Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Whittier have the most bearers?
- Whittier is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Whittier?
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/whittierThe 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, “Whittier”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.