Loftus
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) ‘Person from Loftus or Lofthouse’, Yorkshire, ‘house with an upper storey’; (ii) from Irish Gaelic Lachlann or Ó Laichtndin (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 12 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Loftus is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 8,166 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010. Loftus is also written ลอฟตัส in Thai.
- IEIreland≈1 in 12Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 19K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 32K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). 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)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 361 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 12K (inferred from the name graph)
8,166 people, 2010
recorded for this name
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Ireland, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Loftus in other scripts: Thai
(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)- Loftusor(measured from records)
- Irish Gaelic Lachlannor(measured from records)
(i) ‘Person from Loftus or Lofthouse’, Yorkshire, ‘house with an upper storey’; (ii) from Irish Gaelic Lachlann or Ó Laichtndin.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where the surname Loftus is found
(measured from records)Loftus 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 | — | 8,166 | 1 in 41K | 8.2K | Loftus | 361 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈3,600 est. | ≈1 in 19K | — | Loftus | 202 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈890 est. | ≈1 in 46K | — | Loftus | 81 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈850 est. | ≈1 in 32K | — | Loftus | 100 |
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈640 est. | ≈1 in 100K | — | Loftus | 16 |
| IE Ireland | #869 | ≈430 est. | ≈1 in 12K | — | Loftus | 79 |
8,166 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. 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)Loftus is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
English surname adopted by certain bearers of the Gaelic surname 6 Lochlainn (see Laughlin) or 6 Lachtnain (see Lough).
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In Irish, This English name, in Ireland as such since the sixteenth century, is very numerous in Connacht, where it is not English but almost always a synonym of Loughnane. Bibl; Map Mayo
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)- William Loftusb. 1821GBBritish archaeologist (1821-1858)
- Elizabeth Loftusb. 1944USAmerican cognitive psychologist
- Aisling Loftusb. 1990GBEnglish 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)Evidence
(measured from records)22 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 12 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Loftus mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) ‘Person from Loftus or Lofthouse’, Yorkshire, ‘house with an upper storey’; (ii) from Irish Gaelic Lachlann or Ó Laichtndin. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Loftus?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 8.2 thousand people named Loftus, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled loftus. After it come United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and South Africa; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Loftus?
- In the United States, the national register counted 8,166 people named Loftus in 2010, about 1 in 41 thousand residents.
- How common is Loftus compared with other names?
- In Ireland, Loftus is the 869th most common surname of 73,729 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Loftus?
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/loftusThe 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, “Loftus” — ranked 4142nd in the United States (Census Bureau, 2010). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.