Remington

About Remington

Remington is an English surname that became a given name for both boys and girls. It comes from Rimington in Lancashire, interpreted as a settlement on the Riming stream. The three-syllable name has connections with American art and manufacturing, while Remy offers a possible shorter everyday form.

Place-name origin

The surname Remington developed from the town name Rimington. Its final element is Old English tun, meaning an enclosure or town, combined with the name of the Riming stream. The route from a place name to a surname and then a first name gives Remington its English background.

Rimington preserves the place-name spelling with an I in the first syllable, while Remington is the familiar surname form used as a given name. The final -ton belongs to a common English place-name pattern.

One possible namesake is Eliphalet Remington, the nineteenth-century American manufacturer, or his sons, whose family name became attached to the firearms company. That industrial association is one part of the name's American history, alongside its separate artistic connections.

Frederic Remington's sculpture

Artist Frederic Remington gives the surname an important place in American visual culture. His bronze The Broncho Buster was copyrighted in October 1895 and was his first sculpture.

The work depicts a cowboy struggling to remain on a bucking horse. Its movement and precarious balance made it a recognisable image of the American West. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes it as the first cowboy sculpture cast in bronze.

This association belongs to Remington as the artist's family name. It connects the modern given name with a specific work of art, one that captures action through the rider's posture and the raised movement of the horse.

Remington and the typewriter

The Remington name also became familiar in the history of writing technology. The company put its first typewriter on the market in 1874, selling the machine for $125.

The Sholes and Glidden Type Writer borrowed features from the sewing machines Remington had also manufactured. It stood on a sewing-machine-style base, and a treadle operated the carriage return and advanced the paper. Its decorated black casing also resembled the company's sewing machines.

The first model typed only capital letters. A second model, introduced in 1878, allowed both uppercase and lowercase. This gives the surname an association with the development of the mechanical keyboard as well as with sculpture and other manufactured products.

Pronunciation and shorter forms

Remington is pronounced REM-ing-tun, with three syllables and stress on the first. The middle syllable contains the NG sound in “sing,” and the last is light and unstressed.

Remy or Remi could work as informal shortenings taken from the opening. They also exist as names with their own histories, so their use as nicknames here comes from the sound of Remington.

American popularity

For American boys, Remington rose from 205 births in 2000 to 1,658 in 2019, when it reached its strongest rank of #227. In 2025, 1,105 boys received the name, placing it at #307.

Girls' use also grew, reaching 897 births and #347 in 2021. In 2025, there were 580 girls named Remington, at #513. It is consequently a surname name with substantial recent use for both sexes.

How popular is Remington?

In 2025, Remington ranked #307 among boys in the United States, with 1,105 recorded uses. The U.S. birth records first list this spelling for boys in 1955; its largest annual count was 1,658 in 2019. Rankings count each spelling separately. They describe national use, so local familiarity can differ. The popularity chart shows whether the name has remained common, returned after a quieter period, or risen recently.