Fulton

loc · Latin script

Meaning: (i) person from Fulton, Borders, from a place-name meaning ‘farmstead frequented by birds’; (ii) a different form of Fullerton

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

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

Fulton is a name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States1 in 10K(measured from records)
  • GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 8.9K
  • AUAustralia≈1 in 9K

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)

≈150,000 people, est.

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
479 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

≈1 in 8.9K (inferred from the name graph)

United Kingdom, est.

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

FultonLatin(measured from records)
ฟูลตันThai(measured from records)

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)

(i) person from Fulton, Borders, from a place-name meaning ‘farmstead frequented by birds’; (ii) a different form of Fullerton.

Sources 1

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

Where in the world(measured from records)

Fulton 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 Fulton is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
CN China≈150,000 est.≈1 in 9.5K—Fulton8
US United States32,2581 in 10K32KFulton479
GB United Kingdom≈7,400 est.≈1 in 8.9KlistedFulton208
CA Canada≈3,800 est.≈1 in 9.8K1Fulton166
AU Australia≈2,800 est.≈1 in 9K—Fulton149
KY Cayman Islands≈6 est.≈1 in 10K—Fulton6

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; Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender. 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)

Fulton is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Bangla name4 spellings in the group

    Also written ফুলটন

55 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)

Fulton 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.

  • Transferred use of the Scottish surname, which seems to have been originally a local name from a lost place in Ayrshire. Robert Fulton (1765-1815) was the American engineer who designed the first commercially successful steamboat.

    as a nameA concise dictionary of first names

  • In English, An English habitational surname from Old English.

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

  • In Irish, A Scottish toponymic numerous in Ulster since the seventeenth century. Bibl

    as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland

  • Scottish: transferred use of the surname, which seems to have been originally a local name from a lost place in Ayrshire. Robert Fulton (1765–1815) was the American engineer who designed the first commercially successful steamboat.

    as a word

  • In Croatian, američki inženjer, slikar i izumitelj; izradio prvi komercijalno upotrebljiv parobrod ( Clermont ,1808), prvi ratni brod na parni pogon i prvu pokusnu podmornicu

    as a wordHrvatski jezični portal (HJP) dictionary export

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)

1700180019002000Robert Fulton, b. 1765William S. Fulton, b. 1795Ruth Benedict, b. 1887Ted Stevens, b. 1923Donn Eisele, b. 1930Jerry Cantrell, b. 1966Christina Fulton, b. 1967Pierce Fulton, b. 1992Jay Fulton, b. 1994Grace Fulton, b. 1996
  • Robert Fultonb. 1765USAmerican engineer and inventor (1765–1815)
  • William S. Fultonb. 1795US4th governor of Arkansas Territory (1795-1844)
  • Ruth Benedictb. 1887USnot in their usual nameAmerican anthropologist and folklorologist (1887-1948)
  • Ted Stevensb. 1923USnot in their usual nameAmerican politician (1923–2010)
  • Donn Eiseleb. 1930USnot in their usual nameAmerican astronaut (1930–1987)
  • Jerry Cantrellb. 1966USnot in their usual nameAmerican guitarist and singer
  • Christina Fultonb. 1967USAmerican actress
  • Pierce Fultonb. 1992USAmerican DJ, multi-instrumentalist and record producer
  • Jay Fultonb. 1994GBassociation football player
  • Grace Fultonb. 1996USAmerican actress

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 Colleague,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 38 sources across 23 countries.

Official registers attesting Fulton
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201032K#1,083
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200032K#1,017
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202031K#1,118
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 4

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • 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 Fulton mean, and where does it come from?
(i) person from Fulton, Borders, from a place-name meaning ‘farmstead frequented by birds’; (ii) a different form of Fullerton. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Fulton?
A machine transcription gives /fʊltʌn/ (IPA) for English.
In which country does Fulton have the most bearers?
Mondonomo estimates about 146 thousand people named Fulton in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled fulton.
How common is the name Fulton?
In the United States, the national register counted 32,258 people named Fulton in 2010, about 1 in 10 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about Fulton?

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

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

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

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, “Fulton”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Fulton parses inside a full name →