Getty
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from Irish Gaelic Mag Eitigh 'son of Eiteach', a personal name from eiteach 'winged'
Recorded as a female name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈɡɛti/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Getty is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 87K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 117K
- GHGhana≈1 in 39K
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.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 280 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 39K (inferred from the name graph)
2,842 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Ghana, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from Irish Gaelic Mag Eitigh 'son of Eiteach', a personal name from eiteach 'winged'.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Getty 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 | 2,842 | 1 in 117K | 2.9K | Getty | 280 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈750 est. | ≈1 in 87K | — | Getty | 107 |
| GH Ghana | ≈750 est. | ≈1 in 39K | — | Getty | 8 |
| CA Canada | ≈430 est. | ≈1 in 87K | — | Getty | 83 |
| IT Italy | ≈400 est. | ≈1 in 157K | — | Getty | 7 |
| IE Ireland | ≈68 est. | ≈1 in 76K | — | Getty | 17 |
2,842 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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000. 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)
Getty is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic Mag Eitigh ‘son of Eiteach’, a personal name from eiteach ‘winged’.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, J. Paul, US industrialist
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Irish, Exclusively a Derry and Antrim name and is a known abbreviation of the Scottish Dalgetty, so this may be accepted as its usual origin. Mag Eitigh is used as the form in Irish
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
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)
- George Gettyb. 1855USAmerican lawyer (1855–1930)
- Jean Paul Gettyb. 1892USAmerican industrialist and art collector (1892–1976)
- Estelle Gettyb. 1923USAmerican actress (1923–2008)
- Paul Gettyb. 1932USBritish philanthropist and book collector (1932–2003)
- Gordon Gettyb. 1933USAmerican businessman, investor, philanthropist and classical music composer
- Gisela Gettyb. 1949DEGerman author
- John Paul Getty IIIb. 1956USeldest of the five children of John Paul Getty, Jr. (1956-2011)
- Mark Gettyb. 1960USIrish businessman
- Pia Gettyb. 1966USAmerican filmmaker
- Balthazar Gettyb. 1975USAmerican actor and musician
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)
Attested in 20 sources across 9 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.9K | #10,282 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.8K | #11,142 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.5K | #11,914 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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 Getty mean, and where does it come from?
- from Irish Gaelic Mag Eitigh 'son of Eiteach', a personal name from eiteach 'winged'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Getty?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈɡɛti/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Getty have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 2.8 thousand people named Getty, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled getty.
- How common is the name Getty?
- In the United States, the national register counted 2,842 people named Getty in 2010, about 1 in 117 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Getty?
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/gettyThe 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, “Getty”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.