Stein
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in English: person who lives on stony ground or by a stone marker, or stone-worker; also an invented Jewish name based on German Stein ‘stone’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/staɪn/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Stein is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Germany than in any other country, where it is the 69th most common surname.
- DEGermany≈1 in 1.7K(inferred from the name graph)
- ATAustria≈1 in 5.4K
- CACanada≈1 in 7.6K
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
- 506 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.7K (inferred from the name graph)
≈48,000 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)
person who lives on stony ground or by a stone marker, or stone-worker; also an invented Jewish name based on German Stein ‘stone’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 9 languages in the etymology graph.
How Stein is read(measured from records)
Stein is one spelling over 2 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- English70%
person who lives on stony ground or by a stone marker, or stone-worker; also an invented Jewish name based on German Stein ‘stone’.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
contracted Scottish form of the personal name Stephen.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Variant of Stevenson, extant from the 16th century; associated with Ayrshire.
as a nameScottish Surnames
- German13%
High German equivalent of Low German Steen; from the word for ‘stone’
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
from ahd. stein, as. sten ‘stone’; often from place-names with Stein-
as a nameDeutsche Namenkunde: Unsere Familiennamen nach ihrer Entstehung und Bedeutung
Plate shows o/ö vowel variation in this surname type. Bearer count: 92.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 1: Graphematik/Phonologie der Familiennamen I, Vokalismus
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Stein 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 | #69 | ≈48,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.7K | listed | Stein | 219 |
| US United States | #587 | 43,389 | 1 in 7.7K | 43K | Stein | 506 |
| BR Brazil | — | 13,411 | 1 in 16K | 13K | — | 7 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈6,600 est. | ≈1 in 10K | 312 | Stein | 183 |
| CA Canada | #708 | ≈5,000 est. | ≈1 in 7.6K | — | Stein | 184 |
| AT Austria | #437 | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 5.4K | — | Stein | 77 |
| IL Israel | — | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 7.4K | — | Stein | 71 |
| NO Norway | — | 820 | 1 in 6.7K | 23K | Stein | 117 |
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; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname). 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).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Aurel Steinb. 1862HUHungarian-British archaeologist (1862-1943)
- Leo Steinb. 1872USAmerican art collector and critic (1872–1947)
- Gertrude Steinb. 1874USAmerican author (1874–1946)
- Edith Steinb. 1891DEJewish-German Catholic nun, theologian and philosopher (1891–1942)
- William Howard Steinb. 1911USAmerican biochemist (1911–1980)
- Elias Menachem Steinb. 1931USAmerican mathematician (1931-2018)
- Ben Steinb. 1944USAmerican actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist
- Jill Steinb. 1950USAmerican politician and physician (born 1950)
- Jeremy C. Steinb. 1960USAmerican economist
- Axel Steinb. 1982DEGerman actor and comedian
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 62 sources across 33 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 43K | #796 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 43K | #720 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 41K | #812 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 13K | #1,077 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 820 | #1,457 |
| NO Norway | SSB PxWebApi — Persons/Last names by year (StatBank tables 10501/12891) | 2025 | 410 | — |
Reference works 7
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- 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
- Hoffman, Polish Surnames: Origins and Meanings (2nd ed., 2012)
- Søndergaard, Georg, Danske efternavne (Lademann 1984/1991)
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 Stein mean, and where does it come from?
- person who lives on stony ground or by a stone marker, or stone-worker; also an invented Jewish name based on German Stein ‘stone’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Stein?
- A machine transcription gives /staɪn/ (IPA) for English.
- What are other forms of the name Stein?
- In the etymology graph, Stone and Steen are forms of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Stein have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 48 thousand people named Stein in Germany, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled stein.
- How common is the name Stein?
- In the United States, the national register counted 43,389 people named Stein in 2010, about 1 in 7.7 thousand residents.
- How common is Stein compared with other names?
- In Germany, Stein is the 69th most common surname of 765,306 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Stein?
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/steinThe 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, “Stein” — the 69th most common surname in Germany. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.