Tobin
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) from Irish Gaelic Tóibín, literally 'person from Saint-Aubin, Brittany'; (ii) 'little Tobias'
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈtoʊbɪn/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Tobin is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- IEIreland≈1 in 3.3K(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 8.9K
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 11K
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.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 443 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 3.3K (inferred from the name graph)
18,932 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Ireland, 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)
(i) from Irish Gaelic Tóibín, literally 'person from Saint-Aubin, Brittany'; (ii) 'little Tobias'.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Tobin, most often first. They share a style rather than an origin.
From the names suggested together in public name-advice forums, in English. A list of what people consider, not a measure of how common any name is.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Tobin 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 | — | 18,932 | 1 in 18K | 19K | Tobin | 443 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈5,900 est. | ≈1 in 11K | 5.2K | Tobin | 202 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈3,200 est. | ≈1 in 12K | 1 | Tobin | 175 |
| AU Australia | #834 | ≈2,900 est. | ≈1 in 8.9K | 2 | Tobin | 165 |
| NG Nigeria | — | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 134K | listed | Tobin | 30 |
| IE Ireland | #278 | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 3.3K | — | Tobin | 111 |
| GY Guyana | — | 180 | 1 in 4.2K | 180 | — | 4 |
18,932 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); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; 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 recorded senses(measured from records)
Tobin 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, de St Aubyn, Toibin; Norman family in Brittany and Munster
as a nameIrish family names
In English, James, US economist (Nobel 1981);
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Irish, Tóibín. A Norman family St. Aubyn, which became completely hibernicized. Bibl; IF Map Kilkenny-Tipperary
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)
- Genevieve Tobinb. 1899USAmerican actress (1899-1995)
- Maurice J. Tobinb. 1901USAmerican politician (1901-1953)
- Dan Tobinb. 1910USAmerican actor (1910-1982)
- James Tobinb. 1918USAmerican economist (1918–2002)
- Tobin Bellb. 1942USAmerican actor (born 1942)
- Alex Tobinb. 1965AUAustralian soccer player
- Amon Tobinb. 1972BRBrazilian musician
- Robert Tobinb. 1983GBBritish athlete
- Jason Tobinb. 1985GBBritish actor
- Becca Tobinb. 1986USAmerican actress and singer
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 53 sources across 29 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 19K | #1,896 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 18K | #1,816 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 18K | #2,012 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 5.2K | #1,531 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 180 | #445 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 6
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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)
- 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 Tobin mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) from Irish Gaelic Tóibín, literally 'person from Saint-Aubin, Brittany'; (ii) 'little Tobias'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Tobin?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈtoʊbɪn/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Tobin have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 19 thousand people named Tobin, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled tobin.
- How common is the name Tobin?
- In the United States, the national register counted 18,932 people named Tobin in 2010, about 1 in 18 thousand residents.
- How common is Tobin compared with other names?
- In Ireland, Tobin is the 278th most common surname of 73,729 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Tobin?
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/tobinThe 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, “Tobin” — the 278th most common surname in Ireland. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.