Slack
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) person living in a shallow valley, or from a place called Slack; (ii) nickname for a lazy person (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 15 countries · latest register: St Kitts & Nevis, 2026
Slack is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country: 13,377 people, counted by the Census Bureau in 2010.
- KNSt. Kitts & Nevis1 in 1.3K(measured from records)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 12K
- CACanada≈1 in 18K
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)
- Record sources
- 401 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.3K (inferred from the name graph)
13,377 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
St. Kitts & Nevis
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)(i) person living in a shallow valley, or from a place called Slack; (ii) nickname for a lazy person.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where the surname Slack is found
(measured from records)Slack 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 | 13,377 | 1 in 25K | 13K | Slack | 401 |
| GB United Kingdom | ≈5,700 est. | ≈1 in 12K | 8K | Slack | 202 |
| CA Canada | ≈2,200 est. | ≈1 in 18K | — | Slack | 132 |
| AU Australia | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 23K | — | Slack | 113 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈580 est. | ≈1 in 111K | — | Slack | 35 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈290 est. | ≈1 in 18K | — | Slack | 37 |
| KN St. Kitts & Nevis | 43 | 1 in 1.3K | 43 | — | 5 |
13,377 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; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); St Kitts & Nevis — Register of Electors 2026. 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)Slack 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.
In English, from OE slēac, slæc ‘lazy, careless, slow’; first attested Gerebod le Slac 1195 P (L)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, for someone who lived in a shallow valley. Northern ME slack (ON slakki) or habitation name from one of the places named with this term, for example near Stainland and near Hebden Bridge in W Yorks. 2. nickname for an idle or indolent person, from ME slack lazy, careless (OE slcec).
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, The part of anything that hangs loose, having no strain upon it.
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)- Freddie Slackb. 1910USAmerican musician
- Charles Roger Slackb. 1937GBBritish-born plant scientist and biochemist (1937–2016)
- Yasmin Mrabetb. 1999ESnot in their usual nameMoroccan association football player
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)24 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 15 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Slack mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) person living in a shallow valley, or from a place called Slack; (ii) nickname for a lazy person. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Slack?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 13 thousand people named Slack, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled slack. After it come United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and South Africa; the country table on this page ranks them.
- Where is Slack most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Slack is densest in St. Kitts & Nevis — about 1 in 1.3 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Slack?
- In the United States, the national register counted 13,377 people named Slack in 2010, about 1 in 25 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Slack?
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/slackThe 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, “Slack” — ranked 2579th in the United States (Census Bureau, 2010). Data snapshot 2026-10-13.