Wendell
given name · Latin script
Meaning: (i) turner of wooden, metal, bone, etc
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/wɛndəɫ/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Wendell is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- IEIreland≈1 in 6K(inferred from the name graph)
- SGSingapore≈1 in 8.9K
- CACanada≈1 in 9.6K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 432 (measured from records)
- 1 in 2.9K (inferred from the name graph)
≈230,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Guyana
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
(i) turner of wooden, metal, bone, etc. objects on a lathe, from a derivative of Middle High German wendel ‘turn’; (ii) from a pet-form of the medieval German and Dutch male personal name Wendo.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Wendell counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈230,000 est. | ≈1 in 6.2K | — | Wendell | 16 |
| US United States | #809 | 28,292 | 1 in 12K | 28K | Wendell | 432 |
| BR Brazil | — | 11,154 | 1 in 19K | 11K | — | 8 |
| PH Philippines | — | ≈10,000 est. | ≈1 in 10K | listed | Wendell | 100 |
| ID Indonesia | — | ≈10,000 est. | ≈1 in 26K | — | Wendell | 22 |
| CA Canada | #904 | ≈3,900 est. | ≈1 in 9.6K | 1 | Wendell | 143 |
| IE Ireland | #368 | ≈870 est. | ≈1 in 6K | — | Wendell | 4 |
| SG Singapore | #659 | ≈700 est. | ≈1 in 8.9K | — | Wendell | 24 |
| GY Guyana | — | 259 | 1 in 2.9K | 259 | — | 4 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); the ph-wiktionary-names register; Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025. Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Other recorded senses(measured from records)
Wendell 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 English, A surname originating as a patronymic.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Wendish [Serbian]
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, lang., Germany
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, Valley or wanderer.
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
English (esp. U.S.): from the surname derived in the Middle Ages from the Continental Germanic personal name WENDEL . It has been adopted as a given name as a result of the fame of the American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94) and his jurist son, also Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), members of a leading New England family.
as a word
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(measured from records)
- Oliver Wendell Holmesb. 1809USAmerican poet and physician (1809–1894)
- Wendell Phillipsb. 1811USAmerican abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator and lawyer (1811-1884)
- Oliver Wendell Holmesb. 1841USAmerican jurist (1841–1935); US Supreme Court justice from 1902 to 1932
- Wendell Willkieb. 1892USAmerican lawyer and corporate executive (1892–1944)
- Wendell Meredith Stanleyb. 1904USAmerican biochemist and virologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1946)
- Wendell Coreyb. 1914USAmerican actor (1914–1968)
- Wendell H. Fordb. 1924USAmerican politician (1924–2015)
- Wendell Berryb. 1934USAmerican writer
- Frank Welkerb. 1946USnot in their usual nameAmerican actor (born 1946)
- Wendell Pierceb. 1963USAmerican actor and businessman
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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 52 sources across 32 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 28K | #1,302 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror) | 2022 | 11K | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 11K | #1,579 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Nomes (census name API) | — | 7.3K | #2,631 |
| BR Brazil | Brasil.IO genero-nomes (IBGE Censo 2010 mirror, CC-BY-SA) | — | 7.3K | #942 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | 2020 | 640 | — |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 277 | #1,302 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 259 | #344 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 67 | — |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 63 | #1,579 |
| BR Brazil | Brasil.IO genero-nomes (IBGE Censo 2010 mirror, CC-BY-SA) | — | 45 | #37,201 |
| CA Canada | Statistics Canada — First names at birth by sex at birth (Table 17-10-0147-01) | 1996 | 14 | — |
Reference works 3
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the name Wendell come from?
- (i) turner of wooden, metal, bone, etc. objects on a lathe, from a derivative of Middle High German wendel ‘turn’; (ii) from a pet-form of the medieval German and Dutch male personal name Wendo. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- Is Wendell a male or female name?
- Wendell 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 Wendell mean?
- Recorded meaning: (i) turner of wooden, metal, bone, etc.
- In which country does Wendell have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 226 thousand people named Wendell in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled wendell.
- Where is Wendell most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Wendell is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 2.9 thousand people — even though China holds more of our records for it.
- How do you pronounce Wendell?
- A machine transcription gives /wɛndəɫ/ (IPA) for English.
- How common is the name Wendell?
- In the United States, the national register counted 28,292 people named Wendell in 2020, about 1 in 12 thousand residents.
- How common is Wendell compared with other names?
- In Ireland, Wendell is the 368th most common given name of 14,976 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Wendell?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/wendellThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
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, “Wendell” — the 368th most common given name in Ireland. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.