Cox

surname · Latin script

Meaning: 'Son of Cocke': from a nickname for a swaggering young man; or from a male personal name; or 'son of a cook'

Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/kɑks/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Cox is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In the United Kingdom it is the 60th most common surname.

rarermore common
  • GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 999(inferred from the name graph)
  • IEIreland≈1 in 1K
  • NZNew Zealand≈1 in 1K

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)

≈860,000 people, est.

#329 (measured from records)

of 19M surnames

Sources
601 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 694 (inferred from the name graph)

Grenada

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

'Son of Cocke': from a nickname for a swaggering young man; or from a male personal name; or 'son of a cook'.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Often considered alongside

Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Cox, most often first. They share a style rather than an origin.

From the names suggested together in public name-advice forums, in English. A list of what people consider, not a measure of how common any name is.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Cox 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.

Where Cox is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
CN China—≈860,000 est.≈1 in 1.6K—Cox32
US United States#70261,2311 in 1.3K261KCox601
GB United Kingdom#60≈66,000 est.≈1 in 999—Cox330
EG Egypt—≈27,000 est.≈1 in 3.9K—Cox21
CA Canada#83≈25,000 est.≈1 in 1.5K—Cox255
AU Australia#72≈23,000 est.≈1 in 1.1K—Cox253
IE Ireland#64≈5,100 est.≈1 in 1K—Cox119
NZ New Zealand#66≈4,700 est.≈1 in 1K—Cox136
GD Grenada—1631 in 694163—6

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; Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 2025. 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Cox is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group
  • Polish surname20 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Poland, Czechia, United Kingdom

    Languages: Polish, Russian, Czech

    Also written Чох, Коксу, Chokh, Çöx, Koksu

  • Hindi surname17 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, Bangladesh, Canada

    Languages: Hindi, Bangla, Urdu

    Also written Cooks, কক্স, Cax, Cőx, ককস

  • Greek surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Greece, United States, United Kingdom, Canada

    Also written Kox, Κοξ

73 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Cox 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.

  • In English, A coxswain of a boat, especially of a racing crew.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In dra-nor-pro, to pluck

    as a wordStarLing Tower of Babel etymological databases (Starostin et al.)

  • In ctu, A crested guan, Penelope purpurascens

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • ISO 639-3 language code for Nanti.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In nhg, maybe, perhaps

    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)

19201940196019802000Ronny Cox, b. 1938Joel Cox, b. 1942Brian Cox, b. 1946Tony Cox, b. 1958Courteney Cox, b. 1964Laverne Cox, b. 1972Richard Ian Cox, b. 1973Jo Cox, b. 1974Deborah Cox, b. 1974Charlie Cox, b. 1982

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)

FormalDear Cox,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 52 sources across 32 countries.

Official registers attesting Cox
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010261K#78
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000254K#72
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020250K#82
GD GrenadaGrenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 20252025163#91
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 7

  • 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)
  • jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
  • Cognomix.it (Nomix s.r.l.) — Italian surname origin dictionary

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 Cox mean, and where does it come from?
'Son of Cocke': from a nickname for a swaggering young man; or from a male personal name; or 'son of a cook'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Cox?
A machine transcription gives /kɑks/ (IPA) for English.
In which country does Cox have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 860 thousand people named Cox in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled cox.
Where is Cox most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Cox is densest in Grenada — about 1 in 694 people — even though China holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Cox?
In the United States, the national register counted 261,231 people named Cox in 2010, about 1 in 1.3 thousand residents.
How common is Cox compared with other names?
In the United Kingdom, Cox is the 60th most common surname of 1,272,424 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Cox?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/cox

The 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, “Cox” — the 60th most common surname in United Kingdom. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Cox parses inside a full name →