Borg
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: (i) ‘Person who lives by a hill-fort or on a hill’, or from a place-name from Old Norse borg ‘fortification’; (ii) from several southern German places; (iii) ‘money lender’, from Yiddish borg ‘credit’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/bɔɹɡ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Borg is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In Malta it is the 4th most common surname.
- MTMalta≈1 in 800(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 5.4K
- USUnited States1 in 69K
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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 301 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 800 (inferred from the name graph)
≈27,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Malta, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
- Old Norseborg(measured from records)
- Yiddishborg(measured from records)
(i) ‘Person who lives by a hill-fort or on a hill’, or from a place-name from Old Norse borg ‘fortification’; (ii) from several southern German places; (iii) ‘money lender’, from Yiddish borg ‘credit’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.
How Borg is read(measured from records)
Borg is one spelling over 4 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.
- English61%
(i) ‘Person who lives by a hill-fort or on a hill’, or from a place-name from Old Norse borg ‘fortification’; (ii) from several southern German places; (iii) ‘money lender’, from Yiddish borg ‘credit’.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Bjorn, Swedish tennis player
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
- French9.4%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Borg in French.
- Maltese5.4%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Borg in Maltese.
- Swedish5.3%
a fortified castle (or city)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)
Borg 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈27,000 est. | ≈1 in 51K | — | Borg | 5 |
| SE Sweden | — | 8,056 | 1 in 1.3K | 8.1K | Borg | 72 |
| US United States | — | 4,843 | 1 in 69K | 4.8K | Borg | 301 |
| AU Australia | #484 | ≈4,800 est. | ≈1 in 5.4K | — | Borg | 176 |
| BJ Benin | #830 | ≈2,700 est. | ≈1 in 4.8K | — | Borg | 6 |
| FI Finland | — | 1,605 | 1 in 3.5K | 1.6K | Borg | 19 |
| NO Norway | — | 1,490 | 1 in 3.7K | 1.5K | Borg | 18 |
| DK Denmark | — | 1,440 | 1 in 4.1K | 1.4K | — | 2 |
| MT Malta | #4 | ≈570 est. | ≈1 in 800 | 25 | Borg | 99 |
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; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); the mt-um-surnames-historical register. 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)
Borg is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Irish, alternative form of buirg (“borough”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Norwegian Bokmål, a castle (fortified building)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In cim, furrow (trench cut in soil)
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)
- Arne Borgb. 1901SESwedish swimmer (1901-1987)
- Veda Ann Borgb. 1915USactress (1915-1973)
- Brita Borgb. 1926SESwedish jazz and schlager singer (1926–2010)
- Carla Bleyb. 1936USnot in their usual nameAmerican jazz composer, pianist, organist and bandleader (1936–2023)
- Marcus Borgb. 1942USAmerican Bible scholar (1942-2015)
- Anita Borgb. 1949USAmerican computer scientist (1949-2003)
- Björn Borgb. 1956SESwedish tennis player (born 1956)
- Anders Borgb. 1968SESwedish politician
- Flula Borgb. 1982DEGerman actor, comedian, musician, and YouTuber
- Christabelle Borgb. 1992MTMaltese singer and songwriter
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 46 sources across 23 countries.
Reference works 9
- 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
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
- Søndergaard, Georg, Danske efternavne (Lademann 1984/1991)
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 Borg mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) ‘Person who lives by a hill-fort or on a hill’, or from a place-name from Old Norse borg ‘fortification’; (ii) from several southern German places; (iii) ‘money lender’, from Yiddish borg ‘credit’… Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- What are other forms of the name Borg?
- In the etymology graph, Burg is a form of the same name in other languages.
- How do you pronounce Borg?
- A machine transcription gives /bɔɹɡ/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Borg have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 27 thousand people named Borg in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled borg.
- How common is the name Borg?
- In Sweden, the national register counted 8,056 people named Borg, about 1 in 1.3 thousand residents.
- How common is Borg compared with other names?
- In Malta, Borg is the 4th most common surname of 5,132 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Borg?
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/borgThe 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, “Borg” — the 4th most common surname in Malta. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.