Bernhardt
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: From the German, Dutch and Scandinavian forms of the Germanic male personal name Bernhard, literally ‘bear-brave’ or ‘bear-strong’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/bɝnhɑɹt/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Bernhardt is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country.
- DEGermany≈1 in 5K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 46K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 63K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Germany (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 341 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 5.0K (inferred from the name graph)
≈16,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Germany, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
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)
From the German, Dutch and Scandinavian forms of the Germanic male personal name Bernhard, literally ‘bear-brave’ or ‘bear-strong’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
How Bernhardt is read(measured from records)
Bernhardt is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English58%
From the German, Dutch and Scandinavian forms of the Germanic male personal name Bernhard, literally ‘bear-brave’ or ‘bear-strong’.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Sarah, French actress
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
- German23%
a male given name from Old High German, equivalent to English Bernard.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
patronymischer Familienname zum Rufnamen Bernhard <bera- 'Bär' + hard 'hart, kühn'; Belege: Bernhardt 6989, Bernhard 4393, Bernhart 569
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 6: Familiennamen aus Rufnamen
- Spanish8.3%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Bernhardt in Spanish.
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Bernhardt 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DE Germany | #353 | ≈16,000 est. | ≈1 in 5K | — | Bernhardt | 184 |
| US United States | — | 7,253 | 1 in 46K | 7.3K | Bernhardt | 341 |
| AR Argentina | — | 1,400 | 1 in 32K | 1.4K | — | 1 |
| EG Egypt | — | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 95K | — | Bernhardt | 3 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈1,000 est. | ≈1 in 63K | — | Bernhardt | 82 |
| AT Austria | — | ≈520 est. | ≈1 in 17K | 10 | Bernhardt | 53 |
| CH Switzerland | — | 224 | 1 in 38K | 224 | Bernhardt | 32 |
| UY Uruguay | — | 107 | 1 in 32K | 107 | — | — |
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; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); Statistik Austria — STATatlas Vornamen WFS (per-name time series 1984–2024); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public). 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)
Bernhardt is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Croatian, francuska kazališna glumica; 1880. osnovala vlastito putujuće kazalište i stekla svjetsku slavu gostujući na gotovo svim kontinentima; slavljena kao najveća kazališna glumica svojega doba
as a wordHrvatski jezični portal (HJP) dictionary export
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)
- Sarah Bernhardtb. 1844FRFrench stage actress, painter and sculptor (1844–1923)
- Maurice Bernhardtb. 1864FRFrench playwright
- Felix Bernardb. 1897USnot in their usual nameAmerican conductor, pianist, and composer of popular music (1897–1944)
- Curtis Bernhardtb. 1899USGerman film director (1899–1981)
- Hans Bernhardtb. 1906DEGerman cyclist (1906–1940)
- Otto Bernhardtb. 1942DEGerman politician (1942–2021)
- Kevin Bernhardtb. 1961USAmerican actor and writer
- Daniel Bernhardtb. 1965CHSwiss actor
- David L. Bernhardtb. 1969US53rd United States Secretary of the Interior
- Edgar Bernhardtb. 1986DEKyrgyz 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 45 sources across 25 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 7.3K | #4,860 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 7.1K | #4,594 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 6.9K | #4,961 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 1.4K | — |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 224 | #5,693 |
| UY Uruguay | INE Uruguay — Apellidos más frecuentes 1902–2024 (Tableau Public) | — | 107 | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 7
- 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 given-name tokens
- 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 Bernhardt mean, and where does it come from?
- From the German, Dutch and Scandinavian forms of the Germanic male personal name Bernhard, literally ‘bear-brave’ or ‘bear-strong’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Bernhardt?
- A machine transcription gives /bɝnhɑɹt/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Bernhardt have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 16 thousand people named Bernhardt in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled bernhardt.
- How common is the name Bernhardt?
- In the United States, the national register counted 7,253 people named Bernhardt in 2010, about 1 in 46 thousand residents.
- How common is Bernhardt compared with other names?
- In Germany, Bernhardt is the 353rd most common surname of 765,306 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Bernhardt?
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/bernhardtThe 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, “Bernhardt” — the 353rd most common surname in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.