Brinks

surname · English · Latin script

Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published

Brinks is a surname, with more bearers in the Netherlands than in any other country. In South Sudan it is the 9th most common surname. It appears chiefly in English and Western Frisian, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: Toponymischer Familienname: zu Brink ‘Böschung, Hang, Rand, Erhebung’ bzw.

rarermore common
  • NLNetherlands1 in 13K
  • USUnited States1 in 278K
  • SSSouth Sudan1 in 5.5K

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

≈2.6K

across 8 countries

Sources
195

11K records

Official registry-verified

1 in 13K

Netherlands

Meaning & origin

recorded in German

Toponymischer Familienname: zu Brink ‘Böschung, Hang, Rand, Erhebung’ bzw. zu einem Ortsnamen; 189 Träger. Varianten/Belege: Brin(c)ks.

Sources 1

  • Deutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 4: Familiennamen nach Herkunft und Wohnstätte

Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.

Where in the world

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

Where Brinks is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
NL Netherlands1,2861K rec.1 in 13K1.3KBrinks53
US United States1,1968.7K rec.1 in 278K1.2KBrinks195
GB United Kingdom240242 rec.Brinks18
CA Canada170168 rec.Brinks18
AU Australia126121 rec.Brinks23
DK Denmark751 in 78K75
SS South Sudan#954173 rec.Brinks1
HN Honduras3233 rec.Brinks2
TR Türkiye3232 rec.Brinks2
CO Colombia3130 rec.Brinks7
JM Jamaica2627 rec.Brinks2
NO Norway226 rec.1 in 249K223

Roughly 1.3K people in Netherlands bear this name (about 1 in 13K). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.

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

Languages

  • English10K69%
  • Western Frisian1.3K9%
  • German8075%
  • Dutch4943%
  • Danish3612%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English10,16669%
Western Frisian1,2869%
German8075%
Dutch4943%
Danish3612%

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

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

  • a separate surname159 records spelled Brinks2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Netherlands

    Also written Brink'S

35 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

Brinks 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 Portuguese, clipping of brincadeira (“just kidding; just joking”)

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

  • In jam, sugar daddy

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

  • In Latvian, Izsauksmes vārds, ko lieto ledus lūšanas trokšņa raksturošanai

    as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)

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

190019502000Kuno Brinks, b. 1908Roel Brinks, b. 1954Elias Brinks, b. 1955Winnie Brinks, b. 1968Ralph Brinks, b. 1973Kimberly Brinks, b. 1990

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 15 sources across 10 countries.

Reference works 2

  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 13 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Brinks?
We estimate roughly 2.6 thousand people bear Brinks (counting its spellings and scripts) across 8 countries in our records.
In which country does Brinks have the most bearers?
We estimate about 1.3 thousand people bear Brinks in the Netherlands, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled brinks.
How common is Brinks compared with other names?
In South Sudan, Brinks is the 9th most common surname of 1,634 surnames recorded there.
What does the name Brinks mean?
Recorded meaning: Toponymischer Familienname: zu Brink ‘Böschung, Hang, Rand, Erhebung’ bzw.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/brinks

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, “Brinks” — the 9th most common surname in South Sudan. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Brinks parses inside a full name →