Grantham
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Person from Grantham, Lincolnshire; either ‘village built on gravel’ or possibly from an Old English personal name meaning ‘snarler’
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 13 countries · latest register: Guyana, 2025
/ˈɡɹæntəm/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary
Grantham is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- FIFinland1 in 186K(measured from records)
- NONorway1 in 391K
- GYGuyana1 in 750K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. 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)
- Record sources
- 60 (measured from records)
- 1 in 32K (inferred from the name graph)
10,379 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Person from Grantham, Lincolnshire; either ‘village built on gravel’ or possibly from an Old English personal name meaning ‘snarler’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world
(measured from records)Grantham 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.
10,379 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; DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. 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)Grantham 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, from Grantham, Lincolnshire; first attested Thomas de Grantham 1220 Cur(Herts)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, English; from the gravelly place or homestead common
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
In English, habitational name from Grantham in Lincolnshire, of uncertain origin. The final element is Old English ham ‘homestead’; the first may be Old English grand ‘gravel’ or perhaps a personal name Granta, which probably originated as a byname meaning ‘snarler’. See also Graham.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, Lines., of uncertain etymology. The final element is OE ham homestead; the first may be OE *grand gravel or per¬ haps a personal name *Granta, which probably originated as a byname meaning ‘Snarler’. See also Graham.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, A market town in South Kesteven district, Lincolnshire, England (OS grid ref SK9136).
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)- Thomas Granthamb. 1634GBEnglish General Baptist minister and theologian
- William Granthamb. 1835GBBritish judge and politician (1835–1911)
- Alexander Granthamb. 1899GBBritish colonial administrator (1899-1978)
- George Granthamb. 1900USAmerican baseball player
- Jeremy Granthamb. 1938GBBritish businessman
- Leslie Granthamb. 1947GBEnglish actor (1947–2018)
- Donald Granthamb. 1947USAmerican composer
- Lucy Granthamb. 1951USactress
- Donte Granthamb. 1995USAmerican basketball player (born 1995)
- Ryan Granthamb. 1998CACanadian convicted murderer and former actor
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)25 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 13 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 10K | #3,440 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 10K | #3,238 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 10K | #3,459 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 30 | #35,317 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 25 | #73,317 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 25 | #71,513 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 14 | #50,299 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 13 | #33,973 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 1 | #624 |
| 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
- 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 Grantham mean, and where does it come from?
- Person from Grantham, Lincolnshire; either ‘village built on gravel’ or possibly from an Old English personal name meaning ‘snarler’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Grantham?
- In English /ˈɡɹæntəm/ (Wiktionary).
- In which country does Grantham have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 10 thousand people named Grantham, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled grantham.
- Where is Grantham most common?
- Grantham is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 32 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Grantham?
- In the United States, the national register counted 10,379 people named Grantham in 2010, about 1 in 32 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Grantham?
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/granthamThe 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, “Grantham”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.