Daniels

surname · English · Latin script

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

Daniels is a surname, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Guyana it is the 6th most common surname. It appears chiefly in English and , written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: son of Daniel.

rarermore common
  • GYGuyana1 in 213
  • ZASouth Africa1 in 1.9K
  • USUnited States1 in 2.3K

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

≈156K

across 11 countries

#766

of 21M surnames

Sources
498

1.5M records

Official registry-verified

1 in 213

Guyana

Meaning & origin

son of Daniel

Sources 1

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

Attested across 23 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world

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

Where Daniels is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States#156146,5701.2M rec.1 in 2.3K147KDaniels498
GB United Kingdom#23976,57766K rec.3Daniels204
AU Australia#26327,65126K rec.Daniels169
CA Canada#22522,73422K rec.Daniels171
ZA South Africa#12015,99915K rec.Daniels115
DE Germany8,5348.2K rec.Daniels129
IT Italy#3166,1496.3K rec.Daniels32
RU Russia4,3794.5K rec.Daniels40
NG Nigeria3,9283.7K rec.Daniels83
GY Guyana#63,5243.8K rec.1 in 2133.5KDaniels20
NZ New Zealand#1563,1963K rec.Daniels75
BE Belgium#2362,6871.8K rec.1 in 4.4K2.7KDaniels99

Roughly 147K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 2.3K). 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

  • English1.5M83%
  • 66K4%
  • Spanish57K3%
  • German20K1%
  • Welsh17K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
English1,491,70483%
65,7494%
Spanish56,9343%
German20,2201%
Welsh17,2231%

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

Daniels is also recorded as 8 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish surname94K records spelled Daniels18 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, France, Brazil, Colombia

    Languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese

    Also written Daniel'S, Daniëls, Dániels, Daniel-S, Danie'Ls

  • a separate surname71K records spelled Daniels6 spellings in the group

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

    Also written Daniel-S, Daniëls, Daniéls, Danieļs, Danie͏̈ls

  • Latvian surname9.3K records spelled Daniels9 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Latvia, United Kingdom, South Africa

    Also written Dāniels, Daniēls, Danieļs, Daņiels, Dāniēls

  • Hindi surname7.6K records spelled Daniels10 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, Canada

    Languages: Hindi, Urdu, Sinhala

    Also written Daniëls, Dáñíèls, ডযানিযেলস

  • Polish surname7.6K records spelled Daniels41 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Poland, Russia, Czechia

    Languages: Polish, Russian, Czech

    Also written Даниэльс, Даниелс, Дэниелс, Даніельс, Даниэлс

  • Swahili surname7.3K records spelled Daniels3 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, South Africa, United Kingdom, Nigeria

    Languages: Swahili, Southern Sotho

    Also written Daniëls

  • Greek surname3.0K records spelled Daniels2 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Greece, United States, United Kingdom, South Africa

    Also written Daniel-S

  • Indonesian surname2.8K records spelled Daniels5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, Indonesia, South Africa, United Kingdom

    Languages: Indonesian, Malay

    Also written Daniëls, Daniel'S

64 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

Daniels is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.

  • In Latvian, Vīrieša vārds

    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.

Over time

0102030402000200520102015202034 · 2018

Show as table
Daniels in SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023), Sweden, 1999–2020
Yearrecords
199912
200011
200610
200712
200812
200918
201019
201121
201225
201323
201428
201529
201630
201731
201834
201932
202034

SE SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)17 years between 1999–2020. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name

19201940196019802000William Daniels, b. 1927Charlie Daniels, b. 1936Anthony Daniels, b. 1946Jeff Daniels, b. 1955Lee Daniels, b. 1959Gary Daniels, b. 1963Ben Daniels, b. 1964Erin Daniels, b. 1973Stormy Daniels, b. 1979Spencer Daniels, b. 1992

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 65 sources across 35 countries.

Official registers attesting Daniels
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20102010147K#187
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20202020141K#194
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 20002000139K#180
LV LatviaPMLP — Personvārdu meklētājs (per-name population-register lookup)6.1K#73
LV LatviaPMLP — Personu vārdi (given names in population register)6.1K
GY GuyanaGuyana — Official List of Electors July 202520253.5K#11
BE BelgiumFamilienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register)20082.7K#332
BE BelgiumStatbel — Noms de famille (family names)2.6K#340
NL NetherlandsCBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007)20071.3K#1,174
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)494#1,906
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020260#28,083
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)248#4,077

Reference works 6

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (Tom II: C-D)
  • 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 2026-09-12 data build · 209 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Daniels?
We estimate roughly 156 thousand people bear Daniels (counting its spellings and scripts) across 11 countries in our records.
In which country does Daniels have the most bearers?
We estimate about 147 thousand people bear Daniels in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled daniels.
Where is Daniels most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Daniels is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 213 people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is Daniels compared with other names?
In the United States, Daniels is the 156th most common surname of 7,257,200 surnames recorded there.
What does the name Daniels mean?
Recorded meaning: son of Daniel
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/daniels

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, “Daniels” — the 156th most common surname in United States. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Daniels parses inside a full name →