Forest
loc · Latin script
Meaning: person who lives in or near a royal forest, or works in one
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 25 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Forest is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in Brazil.
- PTPortugal
- PAPanama
- PRPuerto Rico
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. 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.
- Brazil (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 91 (measured from records)
no count published
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)person who lives in or near a royal forest, or works in one
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Forest, 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)Forest counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population 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)Forest 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, ndogba, igdla ; beasts of the forest, ndo- gba-hania
as a wordVocabulary of the Mende Language
In English, A dense uncultivated tract of trees and undergrowth, larger than woods.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In French, de Forest, nom de plusieurs localités en France.
as a nameDictionnaire des noms de famille du Canada français. Anthroponymie et généalogie. 2e édition
In English, Old English; of the woodland
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
Habitante del bosque
as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado
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)- Forest Ray Moultonb. 1872USAmerican astronomer and mathematician of the XXth century (1872–1952)
- Maurice Arnold de Forestb. 1879FRBritish Member of Parliament (1879-1968)
- Michael Forestb. 1929USactor
- Jean-Claude Forestb. 1930FRFrench comics author
- Mark Forestb. 1933USAmerican actor, bodybuilder and opera singer
- Sue Wilkins Myrickb. 1941USnot in their usual nameAmerican politician
- Denis Forestb. 1960CACanadian actor
- Forest Whitakerb. 1961USAmerican actor
- Dan Forestb. 1967USAmerican politician (born 1967)
- Emmelie de Forestb. 1993DKDanish singer
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).
Evidence
(measured from records)51 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 25 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 5.1K | #6,661 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 5K | #6,270 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 4.9K | #6,676 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1991 | 762 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 434 | #19,323 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 83 | #17,928 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 6
- 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)
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 Forest mean, and where does it come from?
- person who lives in or near a royal forest, or works in one Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Forest have the most bearers?
- Forest is most frequently recorded in Brazil, where it is most often spelled forest.
What do you want to know about Forest?
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/forestThe 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, “Forest”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.