Baillie
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘chief magistrate in a barony or (later) city’, from Older Scots baili, via Middle English
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 17 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
/ˈbeɪli/(recorded in a dictionary) English · from Wiktionary
Baillie is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United Kingdom than in any other country.
- AUAustralia≈1 in 17K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 19K
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 25Kfew records
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.
- United Kingdom (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 257 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 17K (inferred from the name graph)
≈3,600 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Australia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)- Older Scotsbaili(measured from records)
- MiddleEnglish(measured from records)
‘chief magistrate in a barony or (later) city’, from Older Scots baili, via Middle English.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where the surname Baillie is found
(measured from records)Baillie 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 | ≈3,600 est. | ≈1 in 19K | 3 | Baillie | 183 |
| US United States | 1,659 | 1 in 201K | 1.7K | Baillie | 257 |
| AU Australia | ≈1,600 est. | ≈1 in 17K | 1 | Baillie | 125 |
| CA Canada | ≈1,300 est. | ≈1 in 33K | — | Baillie | 143 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈770 est. | ≈1 in 83K | — | Baillie | 34 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 25K | — | Baillie | 71 |
| SG Singapore | ≈150 est. | ≈1 in 40K | — | Baillie | 16 |
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; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present). 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)Baillie is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, Occupational surname from French bailli/Scots bailie ‘steward of an estate’ or later town official; earliest record William de Bailli in 1311.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, The jurisdiction of a bailie or bailiff; a bailiwick.
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)- Matthew Baillieb. 1761GBScottish anatomist, (1761-1823)
- Joanna Baillieb. 1762GBScottish poet and dramatist (1762-1851)
- Charles Cochrane-Baillie, 2nd Baron Lamingtonb. 1860GBBritish politician (1860-1940)
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)32 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 17 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Baillie mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘chief magistrate in a barony or (later) city’, from Older Scots baili, via Middle English. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Baillie?
- In English /ˈbeɪli/ (Wiktionary).
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Baillie?
- Mondonomo estimates about 3.6 thousand people named Baillie in the United Kingdom, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled baillie. After it come United States, Australia, Canada and South Africa; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Baillie?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,659 people named Baillie in 2010, about 1 in 201 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Baillie?
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/baillieThe 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, “Baillie”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.