Bret

given name · English · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Bret is a given name, most frequently recorded in Australia. In New Zealand it is the 78th most common given name. It appears chiefly in English and Spanish, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: from OFr Bret, ‘a Breton’, or from OE Brit/Bryt/Bret, ‘a Briton’; first attested Edward Brit 1066 DB.

rarermore common
  • AUAustralia1 in 612◐
  • NZNew Zealand1 in 1K
  • CACanada1 in 2K

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈141K ●

across 9 countries

4 ●

recorded for this name

Sources
528 ●

1.8M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 2.4K ◐

United States

Spellings & scripts●

BrettLatin · English●1.5M records
เบิร์ดThai · Thai●561 records
ব্রেটBengali · Bangla●1 records
БреттCyrillic · Tajik●0 records

Locally spelled Brett in US United States, AU Australia, GB United Kingdom and 15 more and Brad in TH Thailand, LA Laos, MY Malaysia.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin●

Derivation of Bret: each step is the form the one above it came from.
Bret
  1. OFrBret●
  2. OEBrit/Bryt/Bret●

from OFr Bret, ‘a Breton’, or from OE Brit/Bryt/Bret, ‘a Briton’; first attested Edward Brit 1066 DB

Sources 1

  • A Dictionary of English Surnames

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world●

Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.

Where Bret is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
AU Australia#111189,477119K rec.—91Brett282
US United States#317139,3951.4M rec.1 in 2.4K139KBrett528
GB United Kingdom#37375,27570K rec.—10Brett203
CA Canada#31740,88133K rec.—15Brett203
NZ New Zealand#788,5057K rec.—16Brett127
IT Italy#8326,0696.4K rec.—1Brett37
ZA South Africa#6405,9246K rec.——Brett116
RU Russia—3,9234.2K rec.——Brett31
PH Philippines—3,5573.3K rec.——Brett51
TH Thailand—2,2882.3K rec.—#902,886Brad58
IE Ireland#3291,9092.6K rec.——Brett67
NL Netherlands—7061.5K rec.1 in 24K706Brett69

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.

Languages●

  • English276K85%
  • Spanish11K4%
  • 5K2%
  • German2.9K1%
  • French2.5K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English275,76285%
Spanish11,3904%
4,9592%
German2,9281%
French2,4811%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way◐

Bret is also recorded as 4 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • French given name30K records spelled Bret5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, United Kingdom, Canada

    Also written Bret', Brèt, Breţ

  • Spanish given name18K records spelled Bret4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese

    Also written Brët, Brêt

  • German given name3.3K records spelled Bret2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Germany, Austria, United Kingdom

    Also written Brêt

  • Arabic given name1.6K records spelled Bret27 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia

    Languages: Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic

    Also written Brett, ברט, ברץ, Bart, בארט

47 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●

Bret is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In English, A male given name transferred from the surname, variant of Brett, ultimately meaning "a Breton".

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

  • In English, Bretagne [Brittany]

    as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  • In odt, broad, wide

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

  • In tpi, bread

    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.

Over time●

05001K1.5K2K194019601980200020201.8K · 1959

Show as table
Bret in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1926–2025
Yearrecords
19265
194010
19419
194312
19448
194510
194612
194728
194819
194925
195034
195125
195248
195355
195482
195591
195681
1957194
19581,514
19591,839
19601,242
1961741
1962787
1963787
1964786
1965743
1966860
1967837
1968841
1969791
1970871
1971734
1972628
1973541
1974509
1975462
1976505
1977415
1978381
1979490
1980410
1981532
19821,098
1983504
1984458
1985502
1986509
1987536
1988487
1989545
1990546
1991516
1992463
1993405
1994414
1995388
1996350
1997285
1998305
1999335
2000274
2001246
2002189
2003171
2004160
2005151
200699
2007109
2008123
200996
201089
201172
201242
201339
201445
201533
201633
201723
201834
201921
202017
202122
202223
202327
202421
202520

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 86 years between 1926–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

18001850190019502000Bret Harte, b. 1836Bret Hart, b. 1957Bret Michaels, b. 1963Bret Easton Ellis, b. 1964Bret Baier, b. 1970Bret McKenzie, b. 1976Bret Taylor, b. 1980Bret Iwan, b. 1982Bret Harrison, b. 1982Bret Loehr, b. 1993

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).

Evidence●

Attested in 47 sources across 24 countries.

Official registers attesting Bret
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202025K#1,384
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)1991564—
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020244#1,384
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—211#15,867
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—211#15,850
AR ArgentinaRENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national)—209—
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010132#129,047
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000124#127,186
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020113#147,221
CZ CzechiaMVČR — living population register 2017—70#22,539
CZ CzechiaKdeJsme.cz — četnost jmen a příjmení (MVČR population register front-end)—70#9,105
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—61#91,082

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 given-name 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 2026-09-12 data build · 252 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Bret?
We estimate roughly 141 thousand people bear Bret (counting its spellings and scripts) across 9 countries in our records.
In which country does Bret have the most bearers?
Bret is most frequently recorded in Australia, where it is most often spelled brett.
How common is Bret compared with other names?
In Australia, Bret is the 111th most common given name of 197,734 given names recorded there.
Is Bret a male or female name?
Bret is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
What does the name Bret mean?
Recorded meaning: from OFr Bret, ‘a Breton’, or from OE Brit/Bryt/Bret, ‘a Briton’; first attested Edward Brit 1066 DB
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/bret

The same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.

About this data

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.

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, “Bret” — the 111th most common given name in Australia. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Bret parses inside a full name →