Pedersen
surname · Danish · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Pedersen is a surname, with more bearers in Denmark than in any other country, where it is the 5th most common surname. It appears chiefly in Danish and English, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: ‘son of Peder, a Danish and Norwegian form of Peter’.
- DKDenmark1 in 42◐
- NONorway1 in 56
- SESweden1 in 2.1K
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- ≈312K ●
- 2 ●
- Sources
- 338 ●
- 1 in 28 ◐
across 11 countries
recorded for this name
281K records
Official registry-verified
Greenland
Spellings & scripts●
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Pederson in US United States, GB United Kingdom, CA Canada and 7 more and Petersen in TH Thailand.
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●
‘son of Peder, a Danish and Norwegian form of Peter’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world●
Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DK Denmark | #5 | 140,838△ | 36K rec. | 1 in 42 | 141K | Pedersen | 224 |
| NO Norway | #7 | 98,055△ | 13K rec. | 1 in 56 | 98K | Pedersen | 118 |
| US United States | — | 58,480 | 190K rec. | 1 in 5.7K | 59K | Pederson | 338 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | 7,625 | 6.1K rec. | — | — | Pederson | 98 |
| CA Canada | — | 6,624 | 6.1K rec. | — | 1 | Pederson | 100 |
| SE Sweden | #147 | 4,903 | 3.5K rec. | 1 in 2.1K | 4.9K | Pedersen | 95 |
| BR Brazil | — | 2,629△ | 866 rec. | 1 in 81K | 2.6K | Pedersen | 52 |
| GL Greenland | #24 | 2,087△ | 14 rec. | 1 in 28 | 2.1K | Pedersen | 18 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 2,075△ | 292 rec. | 1 in 8.3K | 2.1K | Pedersen | 34 |
| AU Australia | — | 1,978 | 1.9K rec. | — | — | Pederson | 58 |
| AR Argentina | — | 1,725 | 3.7K rec. | 1 in 26K | 1.7K | Pedersen | 41 |
| TH Thailand | — | 1,462 | 1.2K rec. | — | #377,974 | Petersen | 66 |
Roughly 141K people in Denmark bear this name (about 1 in 42). 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●
- Danish489K57%
- English166K19%
- Norwegian Bokmål98K11%
- Norwegian34K4%
- Spanish14K2%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Danish | 489,048 | 57% |
| English | 166,039 | 19% |
| Norwegian Bokmål | 98,055 | 11% |
| Norwegian | 33,789 | 4% |
| Spanish | 13,996 | 2% |
Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.
Other recorded senses●
Pedersen 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 Danish, a common surname originating as a patronymic
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Charles J., US chemist (Nobel
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, pseudonym Knut Hamsun (Nobel
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, Knut Norwegian writer.
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In German, Patronymischer Familienname auf -sen. In Dänemark sehr häufig; Bildung aus Peder/Peter.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 3: Morphologie der Familiennamen
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●
Show as table
| Year | records |
|---|---|
| 2011 | 394 |
| 2012 | 397 |
| 2013 | 389 |
| 2014 | 393 |
| 2015 | 384 |
| 2016 | 391 |
| 2017 | 388 |
| 2018 | 370 |
| 2019 | 375 |
| 2020 | 374 |
| 2021 | 390 |
GL Statistics Greenland — Surnames (NAXT1) — 11 years between 2011–2021. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.
Notable people with this name●
- Vilhelm Pedersenb. 1820DKDanish artist (1820–1859)
- Holger Pedersenb. 1867DKDanish linguist (1867-1953)
- Charles John Pedersenb. 1904USAmerican organic chemist
- Carl-Henning Pedersenb. 1913DKDanish artist (1913-2007)
- Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersenb. 1946DKDanish jazz upright bassist (1946–2005)
- Chris Pedersenb. 1963USAmerican musician, actor, NASCAR racer and autonomous vehicle builder
- Lotta Engbergb. 1963SEnot in their usual nameSwedish singer and television host
- Morten Gamst Pedersenb. 1981NONorwegian footballer (born 1981)
- Rikke Møller Pedersenb. 1989DKDanish swimmer
- Marcus Holmgren Pedersenb. 2000NONorwegian footballer (born 2000)
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 37 sources across 22 countries.
Reference works 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 92 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Pedersen?
- We estimate roughly 312 thousand people bear Pedersen (counting its spellings and scripts) across 11 countries in our records.
- In which country does Pedersen have the most bearers?
- We estimate about 141 thousand people bear Pedersen in Denmark, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled pedersen.
- Where is Pedersen most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Pedersen is densest in Greenland — about 1 in 28 people — even though Denmark holds more of our records for it.
- How common is Pedersen compared with other names?
- In Denmark, Pedersen is the 5th most common surname of 100,227 surnames recorded there.
- What does the name Pedersen mean?
- Recorded meaning: ‘son of Peder, a Danish and Norwegian form of Peter’.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/pedersenThe 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
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, “Pedersen” — the 5th most common surname in Denmark. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.