Selke
surname · Latin script
Meaning: place name
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Selke is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- PLPoland1 in 126K(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 402K
- BRBrazil1 in 762K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 36 (measured from records)
- 1 in 126K (inferred from the name graph)
827 people, 2010
Reference-verified
Poland
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
place name
Sources 1
- Deutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
Where in the world(measured from records)
Selke 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 | 827 | 1 in 402K | 842 | Selke | 11 |
| PL Poland | 305 | 1 in 126K | 153 | — | — |
| BR Brazil | 278 | 1 in 762K | 278 | — | — |
| IN India | 27 | 1 in 49M | 27 | — | — |
| ES Spain | 7 | 1 in 7.1M | 7 | — | — |
| DK Denmark | 5 | 1 in 1.2M | 5 | — | — |
| CH Switzerland | 5 | 1 in 1.7M | 5 | — | — |
827 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; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames). 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)
Selke 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 German, weibl. Vom., Koseform von
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
In Latvian, Somijā un Karēlijā - gala morēnas grēda
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
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)
- Karl Selkeb. 1836DEGerman writer (1836-1893)
- Frank J. Selkeb. 1893CACanadian ice hockey manager (1893–1985)
- Wilhelm Selkeb. 1893DEGerman bookbinder (1893-1945)
- Werner Selkeb. 1901DEGerman chemist (1901-1971)
- Karl-Ernst Selkeb. 1944DEGerman politician (1944-2013)
- Walter Selkeb. 1947DEGerman physicist
- Stefan Selkeb. 1967DEGerman opinion journalist and author
- René Selkeb. 1984DEGerman handball player
- Micha Selkeb. 1990DEGerman badminton player
- Davie Selkeb. 1995DEGerman footballer (born 1995)
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 23 sources across 13 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 842 | #27,049 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 827 | #28,777 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 800 | #31,087 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 278 | #28,188 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 153 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 153 | #21,060 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 152 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 152 | #20,734 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames by state (real counts) from electoral rolls | — | 83 | #5,435 |
| IN India | Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls | — | 27 | #66,434 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 7 | #143,513 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 5 | #101,952 |
Reference works 3
- 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
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 Selke mean, and where does it come from?
- place name Recorded by Deutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung.
- In which country does Selke have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 827 people named Selke, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled selke.
- Where is Selke most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Selke is densest in Poland — about 1 in 126 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Selke?
- In the United States, the national register counted 827 people named Selke in 2010, about 1 in 402 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Selke?
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/selkeThe 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, “Selke”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.