Sutherland

surname · Latin script

Meaning: ‘person from Sutherland’, former county of northern Scotland, literally ‘southern land’

(measured from records)Officially recorded in 27 countries · latest register: Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines, 2025

/ˈsʌðə(ɹ)lənd/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary

Say it in

Sutherland is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.

  • VCSt. Vincent & Grenadines1 in 233(measured from records)
  • NZNew Zealand≈1 in 3.2K
  • GYGuyana1 in 3.3K

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)

29,585 people, 2010

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Record sources
461 (measured from records)

corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling

strongest: highest-authority source

1 in 233 (inferred from the name graph)

St. Vincent & Grenadines

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Spellings & scripts

(measured from records)
SutherlandLatin(measured from records)
ซเธอรแลนดThai(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 from Sutherland’, former county of northern Scotland, literally ‘southern land’.

Cited for this meaning 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Where in the world

(measured from records)

Sutherland 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.

Where Sutherland is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—29,5851 in 11K30KSutherland461
GB United Kingdom#400≈14,000 est.≈1 in 4.6K10KSutherland254
CA Canada#356≈8,200 est.≈1 in 4.6K—Sutherland242
AU Australia#334≈6,800 est.≈1 in 3.8K—Sutherland227
ZA South Africa—≈3,900 est.≈1 in 14K—Sutherland78
NZ New Zealand#210≈1,600 est.≈1 in 3.2K—Sutherland130
JM Jamaica#145≈760 est.≈1 in 3.7K—Sutherland22
VC St. Vincent & Grenadines—4361 in 233486—5
GY Guyana—2251 in 3.3K225—4

29,585 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); Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025); This page presents lists of the most common given names and surnames in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, published on W; 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 names spelled this way

(inferred from the name graph)

Sutherland is also recorded as another name, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Greek surname2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Greece, United States, United Kingdom

    Also written Σαδερλαντ

61 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses

(measured from records)

Sutherland 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, Territorial name from Old Norse sudrland ‘southland’; used by the earldom family, recorded by 1360.

    as a nameScottish Surnames

  • In English, the man from Sutherland; first attested David de Sothirlandae 1332 Black

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • In English, A habitational surname from Old English.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In English, Old Norse; from the southern land

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

  • In Croatian, 1. Earl Wilbur (1915—1974), američki fiziolog, otkrio poseban enzim koji služi kao »glasnik« za funkcioniranje hormona; Nobelova nagrada za medicinu 1971. 2. Graham (1903—1980), engleski slikar ekspresivnih fantastičnih pejzaža i sakralnih kompozicija (predložak za golemu tapiseriju katedrale u Coventryju)

    as a wordHrvatski jezični portal (HJP) dictionary export

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)
1850190019502000Elinor Glyn, b. 1864Graham Vivian Sutherland, b. 1903Earl Wilbur Sutherland, b. 1915Joan Sutherland, b. 1926Donald Sutherland, b. 1935Ivan Sutherland, b. 1938Kristine Sutherland, b. 1955Kiefer Sutherland, b. 1966Rossif Sutherland, b. 1978Alyssa Sutherland, b. 1982

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)
FormalDear Sutherland,
InformalHello,

Evidence

(measured from records)

45 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 27 countries.

Official registers attesting Sutherland
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201030K#1,195
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202029K#1,206
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200028K#1,128
GB United KingdomSurnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register)200210K#726
VC St. Vincent & GrenadinesElectoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025)2025436#37
GY GuyanaGuyana — Official List of Electors July 20252025225#401
GB United KingdomScottish Surnames (Ross, 1994)———
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 5

  • 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)
  • jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)

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 Sutherland mean, and where does it come from?
‘person from Sutherland’, former county of northern Scotland, literally ‘southern land’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Sutherland?
In English /ˈsʌðə(ɹ)lənd/ (Wiktionary).
How common is the name Sutherland?
In the United States, the national register counted 29,585 people named Sutherland in 2010, about 1 in 11 thousand residents.
How common is Sutherland compared with other names?
In Jamaica, Sutherland is the 145th most common surname of 50,451 surnames recorded there.
In which country does Sutherland have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 30 thousand people named Sutherland, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled sutherland.
Where is Sutherland most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Sutherland is densest in St. Vincent & Grenadines — about 1 in 233 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.

What do you want to know about Sutherland?

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/sutherland

The 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, “Sutherland” — the 145th most common surname in Jamaica. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.

See how Sutherland parses inside a full name →