Adey
surname · Latin script
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Adey is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United Kingdom than in any other country. Recorded meaning: pet-form of Ade (Adam); first attested Thomas Ady 1327 SRWo.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 72K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 875K
- AUAustralia≈1 in 130K
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.
- United Kingdom (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 166 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 72K (inferred from the name graph)
≈910 people, est.
Highest-authority source
United Kingdom, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
pet-form of Ade (Adam); first attested Thomas Ady 1327 SRWo
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Adey 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | ≈910 est. | ≈1 in 72K | listed | Adey | 136 |
| NG Nigeria | ≈820 est. | ≈1 in 262K | — | Adey | 18 |
| US United States | 380 | 1 in 875K | 433 | Adey | 166 |
| AU Australia | ≈200 est. | ≈1 in 130K | — | Adey | 57 |
| CA Canada | ≈180 est. | ≈1 in 215K | — | Adey | 58 |
| NO Norway | ≈24 est. | ≈1 in 225K | 10 | — | 2 |
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; the reaney-english-surnames-1991 register; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population). 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)
Adey 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, Thomas Ady 1327 SRWo; William Adee 1524 SRSf. A pet-form of Ade (Adam). Adger: v. EDGAR 15
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, A surname transferred from the given name.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In ivb, thunder
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)
- More Adeyb. 1858GBEnglish editor
- George Adeyb. 1869GBfootballer (1869-?)
- Thomas Adeyb. 1901GBfootball player (1901-1986)
- William Ross Adeyb. 1922AUAustralian clinical biologist (1922–2004)
- Arthur Adeyb. 1930GBScottish footballer (1930-1994)
- Walter H. Adeyb. 1934USbotanist
- Christopher Adeyb. 1943GBBritish non-fiction writer, writer and conductor
- Paul Adeyb. 1963CAformer ice hockey player, ice hockey coach
- Steve AdeyGBEnglish musician, singer-songwriter
- Stephen Thurston AdeyGBBritish Member of Parliament (died 1811)
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(measured from records)
Attested in 29 sources across 14 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 433 | #51,869 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 380 | #54,296 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 367 | #52,935 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of English Surnames (Reaney & Wilson, 1991) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nişanyan Adlar (Turkish given-name national-registry frequency)
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Ethiopian name tokens (GitHub lehagere/ethiopian-names, 40/60 condominium list)
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 Adey mean, and where does it come from?
- pet-form of Ade (Adam); first attested Thomas Ady 1327 SRWo Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- In which country does Adey have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 914 people named Adey in the United Kingdom, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled adey.
- How common is the name Adey?
- In the United States, the national register counted 380 people named Adey in 2010, about 1 in 875 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Adey?
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/adeyThe same 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), and bulk access is licensed separately.
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, “Adey”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.