Besten
surname · Latin script
Meaning: superlative degree of gut: (best)
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Besten is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the Netherlands.
- NLNetherlands
- USUnited States
- HRCroatia
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)
superlative degree of gut: (best)
Sources 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 2 languages 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)
Besten 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 German, patronymischer schwacher Genitiv zu Rufname Sebastian oder Herkunftsname. Bearer count: 92.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 6: Familiennamen aus Rufnamen
In German, from ON Duisburg, Osnabrück; also Bester
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
In se, first-person singular past indicative of beastit
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Swedish, definite singular of best
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)
- Blair Bestenactress
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 9 sources across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 308 | #6,640 |
| HR Croatia | DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form) | 2021 | 59 | #11,848 |
| HR Croatia | DZS — Učestalost prezimena (Popis 2021) | 2021 | 56 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 46 | #111,063 |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 1 | #272,220 |
| DZ Algeria | Algerian names (Kaggle, MIT) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Besten mean, and where does it come from?
- superlative degree of gut: (best) Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- What are other forms of the name Besten?
- In the etymology graph, Best is a form of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Besten have the most bearers?
- Besten is most frequently recorded in the Netherlands.
What do you want to know about Besten?
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/bestenThe 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, “Besten”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.