Hearn
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) person living by a river bend or in a hollow hill, or from places called Herne; (ii) from Heme, Bedfordshire; (iii) variant of Heron (i); (iv) variant of Ahern
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/hɝn/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Hearn is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 22K(measured from records)
- NONorway1 in 249K
- SESweden1 in 729K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Hearn itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 16 (measured from records)
- 1 in 22K (inferred from the name graph)
15,234 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Хирн in FI Finland.
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)
(i) person living by a river bend or in a hollow hill, or from places called Herne; (ii) from Heme, Bedfordshire; (iii) variant of Heron (i); (iv) variant of Ahern.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Hearn 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 | 15,234 | 1 in 22K | 15K | Hearn | 16 |
| FI Finland | 586as Hirn | 1 in 9.5K | 586 | Хирн | 1 |
| AR Argentina | 53as Hearne | 1 in 858K | 53 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 37 | 1 in 1.4M | 37 | — | 1 |
| NO Norway | 22 | 1 in 249K | 22 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | 18as Hirn | 1 in 467K | 18 | — | 1 |
| SE Sweden | 14 | 1 in 729K | 14 | — | — |
15,234 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; DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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)
Hearn 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.
reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 hEachthighearna ‘descendant of Eachthigheama', a personal name meaning ‘lord of horses’, from each ‘horse’ + tighearna ‘master’, ‘lord’. This name is most common in southwestern Ireland.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
habitational name from Heme in Bedfordshire, so called from the dative plural (originally used after a preposition) of Old English hcer ‘stone’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 hUldhrm (see Herron).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, past participle of hear
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Lafcadio, US writer
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)
- Lafcadio Hearnb. 1850JPGreek-Irish writer, translator, and teacher who introduced the culture and literature of Japan to the West (1850–1904)
- Lacey Hearnb. 1881USAmerican Olympic runner (1881–1969)
- Chick Hearnb. 1916USAmerican basketball sportscaster
- Jim Hearnb. 1921USAmerican baseball player
- Donald Hearnb. 1933USDonald Hearn, Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Ill
- George Hearnb. 1934USAmerican actor
- Barry Hearnb. 1948GBBritish sports promoter
- Ann Hearnb. 1953USAmerican actress
- Ed Hearnb. 1960USAmerican baseball player
- Amber Hearnb. 1984NZNew Zealand footballer
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 25 sources across 14 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 15K | #2,385 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 15K | #2,270 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 14K | #2,477 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 37 | #55,376 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 37 | #54,555 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 22 | #40,818 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 14 | #31,951 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 11 | #56,728 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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 Hearn mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) person living by a river bend or in a hollow hill, or from places called Herne; (ii) from Heme, Bedfordshire; (iii) variant of Heron (i); (iv) variant of Ahern. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Hearn?
- A machine transcription gives /hɝn/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Hearn have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 15 thousand people named Hearn, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled hearn.
- Where is Hearn most common?
- Hearn is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 22 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Hearn?
- In the United States, the national register counted 15,234 people named Hearn in 2010, about 1 in 22 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Hearn?
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/hearnThe 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, “Hearn”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.