Cockayne
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from ME cokaygne / OFr coquaigne ‘imaginary land of luxury and idleness’; first attested William Cokein, Cocaine 1193 P (Wa)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 3 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Cockayne is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- AUAustralia
- CACanada
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)from ME cokaygne / OFr coquaigne ‘imaginary land of luxury and idleness’; first attested William Cokein, Cocaine 1193 P (Wa)
Cited for this meaning 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world
(measured from records)Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
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)Cockayne 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 English, Northants, so called from the gen. case of the OE personal name *Cott + OE broc stream (see Brook). ME cokayne cloud-cuckooland, an imaginary paradise (OF Var.: Cotsbrooke. 134 Codina Coibourne Codina Catalan; topographic name for someone who lived on a piece of stony land that could be worked only with difficulty, Cat. codina (LL cotma, a deriv. of cotis stone).
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, Alternative spelling of Cockaigne.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
A botanical plant name author abbreviation for botanist Leonard C. Cockayne (1855-1934).
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)- Ida Cockayneb. 1368GBBritish noble
- William Cockayneb. 1561London merchant
- Aston Cockayneb. 1605GBEnglish cavalier and writer
- Oswald Cockayneb. 1807GBEnglish philologist and teacher
- Leonard Cockayneb. 1855GBNew Zealand botanist and botanical collector (1855–1934)
- Edward Alfred Cockayneb. 1880GBBritish physician and lepidopterist (1880 – 1956)
- Alfred Hyde Cockayneb. 1880NZNew Zealand botanist, agricultural scientist and administrator (1880-1966)
- Elizabeth Cockayneb. 1894GBBritish nursing administrator
- Emily Cockayneb. 1973GBBritish historian
- Donna Cockayneb. 1989AUAustralian association footballer
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)9 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 3 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 320 | #62,531 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 312 | #60,390 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 299 | #70,545 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 8 | #134,434 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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
- What does the name Cockayne mean, and where does it come from?
- from ME cokaygne / OFr coquaigne ‘imaginary land of luxury and idleness’; first attested William Cokein, Cocaine 1193 P (Wa) Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- What are other forms of the name Cockayne?
- In the etymology graph, Cockaigne is a form of the same name in other languages.
- In which country does Cockayne have the most bearers?
- Cockayne is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Cockayne?
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/cockayneThe 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, “Cockayne”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.