Whittle
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) ‘Person from Whittle’, a place-name meaning ‘white hill’; (ii) see Whitwell
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Whittle is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- AUAustralia
- CACanada
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)
(i) ‘Person from Whittle’, a place-name meaning ‘white hill’; (ii) see Whitwell.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
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)
Whittle is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from Whittle, Lancashire/Northumberland, Whittle-le-Woods, Lancashire, or residence near a white hill; first attested Robert de Withull 1242 Fees (Lancashire)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, any of various places, especially one in Lancs., so called from OE hwit White + hyll Hill. 2. var. of Whitwell.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A knife; especially, a clasp-knife, pocket knife, or sheath knife.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Irish, An English toponymic numerous in Co. Waterford as early as 1650, now more so in adjacent Leinster counties
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
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)
- Stafford G. Whittleb. 1849USAmerican lawyer (1849-1931)
- Frank Whittleb. 1907GBBritish Royal Air Force engineer air officer (1907–1996)
- Peter Whittleb. 1927NZmathematician and statistician (1927–2021)
- Peter Whittleb. 1961GBBritish author, politician, and journalist
- Brian Whittleb. 1964GBBritish athlete and politician (born 1964)
- Jennifer Whittleb. 1973AUAustralian basketball player (born 1973)
- Ricky Whittleb. 1981GBEnglish actor and model
- Jon Whittleb. 1982Rugby union and rugby league player
- Jacob Whittleb. 2004GBBritish competitive swimmer (born 2004)
- Annie WhittleNZNew Zealand actor-singer
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 22 sources across 13 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 Whittle mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) ‘Person from Whittle’, a place-name meaning ‘white hill’; (ii) see Whitwell. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Whittle have the most bearers?
- Whittle is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Whittle?
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/whittleThe 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, “Whittle”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.