Donner

surname · Latin script

Meaning, in English: (i) Medieval German nickname from Middle High German doner ‘thunder’; (ii) invented Jewish surname from German Donner ‘thunder’

(measured from records)Officially recorded in 19 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020

/ˈdɔnɐ/(recorded in a dictionary) German · from Wiktionary

Say it inExplore pronunciation →

Donner is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Ireland it is the 50th most common surname.

  • ATAustria≈1 in 12Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
  • DEGermany≈1 in 14K
  • FIFinland1 in 16K

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 Donner itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

64,572 named Conner, 2010

3 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Record sources
504 (measured from records)

corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling

strongest: highest-authority source

≈1 in 12K (inferred from the name graph)

Austria, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)Make your nomograph ✦

Spellings & scripts

(measured from records)
ConnorLatin(measured from records)
ΚονορGreek(measured from records)
คอนเนอรThai(measured from records)

2 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Connor in US United States, GB United Kingdom, AU Australia and 1 more and Conor in IE Ireland, BR Brazil.

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)
Derivation of Donner: each step is the form the one above it came from.
Donner
  1. Middle High Germandoner(measured from records)
  2. German Donner‘thunder’(measured from records)

(i) Medieval German nickname from Middle High German doner ‘thunder’; (ii) invented Jewish surname from German Donner ‘thunder’.

Cited for this meaning 1

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

Attested across 21 languages in the etymology graph.

How Donner is read

(measured from records)

Donner is one spelling over 2 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.

  • English69%

    (i) Medieval German nickname from Middle High German doner ‘thunder’; (ii) invented Jewish surname from German Donner ‘thunder’.

    as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

    To beat up; clobber; thrash.

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

    from AFr donour ‘giver, granter’; first attested Gilbert Donur 1267 FFL

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • German13%

    from a weather nickname meaning 'thunder'

    as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung

    probably from old German Donner

    as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung

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 the surname Donner is found

(measured from records)

Donner 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 Donner is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#45364,572as Conner1 in 5.2K207KConnor504
GB United Kingdom#281≈16,000 est.≈1 in 4.3K58Connor283
DE Germany—≈5,900 est.≈1 in 14K—Donner131
AU Australia#296≈5,400 est.≈1 in 5K101Connor203
CA Canada#414≈4,600 est.≈1 in 9K36Connor264
IE Ireland#50≈2,100 est.≈1 in 2.6K427Conor176
AT Austria#937≈760 est.≈1 in 12K83Donner43
BR Brazil—3581 in 591K358Conor4
KN St. Kitts & Nevis—154as Connor1 in 349154—13

64,572 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010, counting the spelling conner. 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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); NSW BDM — Popular baby names (1952–present); CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; Statistik Austria — STATatlas Vornamen WFS (per-name time series 1984–2024); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); 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 names spelled this way

(inferred from the name graph)

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

  • French surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Belgium, Switzerland

    Also written Dõnner

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Donnér

  • Finnish surname3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Finland

    Also written Donnér

  • Russian surname8 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, United States

    Languages: Russian, Ukrainian, Polish

    Also written Доннер, Доннёр

49 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)

Donner 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 pcd, to give, to transfer the possession/holding of something to someone else.

    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)
1920193019401950Clive Donner, b. 1926Richard Donner, b. 1930Lauren Shuler Donner, b. 1949

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 Donner,
InformalHello,

Evidence

(measured from records)

35 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 19 countries.

Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Donner mean, and where does it come from?
(i) Medieval German nickname from Middle High German doner ‘thunder’; (ii) invented Jewish surname from German Donner ‘thunder’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Donner?
In German /ˈdɔnɐ/ (Wiktionary).
Which countries have the most people with the surname Donner?
In the United States, the national register counted about 65 thousand people named Conner, more than in any other country we hold. After it come United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and Canada; the country table on this page ranks them.
How common is the name Donner?
In Brazil, the national register counted 358 people named Donner, about 1 in 591 thousand residents.
How common is Donner compared with other names?
In the United States, Donner is the 453rd most common surname of 6,282,806 surnames recorded there.

What do you want to know about Donner?

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

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, “Donner” — the 453rd most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.

See how Donner parses inside a full name →