Daff
surname · Latin script
Meaning: A fool; an idiot; a blockhead
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 8 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
/dæf/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary
Daff is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- GYGuyana1 in 13Kas Duff(measured from records)
- USUnited States1 in 20Kas Duff
- CHSwitzerland1 in 37Kas Duff
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Daff itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 28 (measured from records)
- 1 in 13K (inferred from the name graph)
16,536 named Duff, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Guyana, as Duff
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)Locally spelled Duff in US United States, CH Switzerland.
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)A fool; an idiot; a blockhead.
Cited for this meaning 1
- kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Daff 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 | 16,536as Duff | 1 in 20K | 17K | Duff | 28 |
| CH Switzerland | 227as Duff | 1 in 37K | 227 | Duff | 3 |
| ES Spain | 63as Duff | 1 in 794K | 63 | — | 1 |
| GY Guyana | 57as Duff | 1 in 13K | 57 | — | — |
| NO Norway | 46as Duff | 1 in 119K | 46 | — | — |
| KN St. Kitts & Nevis | 1as Duff | 1 in 54K | 1 | — | — |
16,536 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; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); St Kitts & Nevis — Register of Electors 2026. 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)Daff 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 Norwegian Nynorsk, energyless (about somebody)
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)- Lily Attey Daffb. 1885NZBritish born New Zealand artist (1885-1945)
- Al Daffb. 1902AUAustralian filmmaker
- Moussa DaffSNSenegalese linguist
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)14 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 8 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 205 | #90,113 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 198 | #87,348 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 173 | #108,965 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 10 | #120,154 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Daff mean, and where does it come from?
- A fool; an idiot; a blockhead. Recorded by kaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations).
- How do you pronounce Daff?
- In English /dæf/ (Wiktionary).
- In which country does Daff have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 17 thousand people named Duff, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Daff most common?
- No national register we hold counts the spelling Daff itself. The densest figure for its family of spellings is Guyana's: the national register counts about 1 in 13 thousand people named Duff.
- How common is the name Daff?
- In the United States, the national register counted 16,536 people named Duff in 2010, about 1 in 20 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Daff?
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/daffThe 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, “Daff”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.