Held
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Is another title name (bestowing honour), Held means hero and exists in the North of Baden
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/hɛld/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Held is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country.
- DEGermany≈1 in 4.6K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 46K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 60K
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.
- Germany (inferred from the name graph)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 359 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 4.6K (inferred from the name graph)
≈18,000 people, est.
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Germany, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(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)
Is another title name (bestowing honour), Held means hero and exists in the North of Baden.
Sources 1
- The Origin of Jewish Family Names: Morphology and History
Attested across 6 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Held 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DE Germany | #315 | ≈18,000 est. | ≈1 in 4.6K | — | Held | 178 |
| US United States | — | 7,195 | 1 in 46K | 9.1K | Held | 359 |
| CH Switzerland | #906 | 1,246 | 1 in 6.7K | 1.2K | Held | 54 |
| IT Italy | — | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 52K | — | Held | 26 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈1,100 est. | ≈1 in 60K | — | Held | 71 |
| AT Austria | — | ≈560 est. | ≈1 in 16K | — | Held | 57 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 421 | 1 in 41K | 421 | Held | 41 |
| IE Ireland | — | ≈150 est. | ≈1 in 36K | — | Held | 2 |
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; BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007). 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)
Held 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 German, from the old Germanic name element for 'hero, warrior'
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
1 . German and Jewish (Ashkenazic): topographic name from Middle High German heide, German Heide ‘heath’, ‘moor’. Compare Heath. 2. German: from the medieval personal name Haido.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
nickname from Middle High German, Middle Dutch, Yiddish held ‘hero’. As a Jewish name, it is often ornamental.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
from a short form of any of the Germanic personal names formed with hild ‘strife’ as the first element.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In German, hero
as a wordA Frequency Dictionary of German
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)
- Heinrich Heldb. 1868DEGerman politician (1868-1938)
- Anna Heldb. 1872USFrench-American stage performer (1872–1918)
- John Held, Jr.b. 1889USAmerican cartoonist, wood block artist and illustrator (1889-1958)
- Kurt Heldb. 1897DEGerman writer (1897-1959)
- Al Heldb. 1928USAmerican artist (1928-2005)
- Sigfried Heldb. 1942DEGerman association football player and manager
- Isaac Heldb. 1948USAmerican meteorologist (1948-)
- Alexander Heldb. 1957DEGerman actor (1958–2026)
- Wolfgang Heldb. 1963DEAmerican German cinematographer
- Ryan Heldb. 1995USAmerican swimmer
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 33 sources across 19 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 9.1K | #3,574 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 8K | #4,266 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 7.2K | #4,896 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 1.2K | #903 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 421 | #4,742 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 6
- 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
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 Held mean, and where does it come from?
- Is another title name (bestowing honour), Held means hero and exists in the North of Baden. Recorded by The Origin of Jewish Family Names: Morphology and History.
- How do you pronounce Held?
- A machine transcription gives /hɛld/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Held have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 18 thousand people named Held in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled held.
- How common is the name Held?
- In the United States, the national register counted 7,195 people named Held in 2010, about 1 in 46 thousand residents.
- How common is Held compared with other names?
- In Germany, Held is the 315th most common surname of 765,306 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Held?
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/heldThe 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, “Held” — the 315th most common surname in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.