Hayé
surname · Latin script
Hayé is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in France than in any other country. Recorded meaning: From Dutch haai (“shark”) or West Flemish haaie (formerly haeye), from the Old Norse hái, a short form of hákarl (“shark”) (a compound of hár (“high, great”) + karl (“man”)).
- JMJamaica≈1 in 13Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- FRFrance≈1 in 27K
- BEBelgium1 in 85K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- France (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 269 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 13K (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,600 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Jamaica, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts
(measured from records)One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Haye in US United States, GB United Kingdom, DE Germany and 3 more.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)From Dutch haai (“shark”) or West Flemish haaie (formerly haeye), from the Old Norse hái, a short form of hákarl (“shark”) (a compound of hár (“high, great”) + karl (“man”)). The German Hai, the Swedish haj and the Danish haj are from the same source.
Cited for this meaning 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wiktionary
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 15 languages in the etymology graph.
Where the surname Hayé is found
(measured from records)Hayé 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FR France | — | ≈2,600 est. | ≈1 in 27K | 309 | — | 5 |
| US United States | — | 1,558 | 1 in 214K | 1.7K | Haye | 269 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈600 est. | ≈1 in 115K | — | Haye | 116 |
| DE Germany | — | ≈570 est. | ≈1 in 146K | — | Haye | 68 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈380 est. | ≈1 in 109K | — | Haye | 78 |
| JM Jamaica | #746 | ≈210 est. | ≈1 in 13K | — | Haye | 15 |
| BE Belgium | — | 138 | 1 in 85K | 138 | Haye | 21 |
| GD Grenada | — | 1 | 1 in 113K | 1 | — | 1 |
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 — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000); Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register); Grenada — Consolidated List of Electors December 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)Hayé 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 nv, brother-in-law
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.
Evidence
(measured from records)No register attests this spelling yet
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Hayé mean, and where does it come from?
- From Dutch haai (“shark”) or West Flemish haaie (formerly haeye), from the Old Norse hái, a short form of hákarl (“shark”) (a compound of hár (“high, great”) + karl (“man”)). Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names and The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and 2 other sources.
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Hayé?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.6 thousand people named Hayé in France, more than in any other country we hold. After it come United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Canada; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Hayé?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,558 people named Hayé in 2010, about 1 in 214 thousand residents.
- How common is Hayé compared with other names?
- In Jamaica, Hayé is the 746th most common surname of 50,451 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Hayé?
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/hay%C3%A9The 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, “Hayé” — the 746th most common surname in Jamaica. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.