Barnsley
loc · Latin script
Meaning: person from Barnsley; from English place-names meaning variously ‘Beorn’s glade’ and ‘Beornmod’s glade’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Barnsley is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- PTPortugal
- PLPoland
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)
person from Barnsley; from English place-names meaning variously ‘Beorn’s glade’ and ‘Beornmod’s glade’
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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)
Barnsley is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from Barnsley (Do, Gl, WRY, Wt); first attested John de Barnusley 1340–1450 GildC
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, places so called, notably one in W Yorks, (from the gen. case of the OE byname Beom ‘Warrior’ + OE leah wood, clearing) and one in Gloucs. (from the gen. case of the OE personal name Beommod (‘warrior spirit’) + leah). The surname is common in the Birmingham area as well as in W Yorks.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, A market town and metropolitan borough in South Yorkshire, England (OS grid ref SE3406).
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, John de Barnusley 1340–1450 GildC; Alice de Berneslegh 1354 Putnam (Ch); Adara de Barnesley 1440 ShefA. From Barnsley (Do, Gl, WRY, Wt).
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
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)
- Godfrey Barnsleyb. 1805GBAmerican businessman (1805–1873)
- James Macdonald Barnsleyb. 1861CACanadian painter (1861–1929)
- Ernest Barnsleyb. 1863English architect and designer
- Grace Barnsleyb. 1896GBBritish artist (1896-1975)
- Edward Barnsleyb. 1900GBEnglish furniture designer and maker (1900–1987)
- Harry Barnsleyb. 1905GBBritish coxswain
- Geoff Barnsleyb. 1935GBfootballer (born 1935)
- Victoria Barnsleyb. 1954GBUK CEO of HarperCollins
- Lester C BarnsleyGBresearcher
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 10 sources across 3 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 138 | #129,045 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 131 | #129,825 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 125 | #126,400 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 6 | #154,812 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| 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 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 Barnsley mean, and where does it come from?
- person from Barnsley; from English place-names meaning variously ‘Beorn’s glade’ and ‘Beornmod’s glade’ Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Barnsley have the most bearers?
- Barnsley is most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
What do you want to know about Barnsley?
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/barnsleyThe 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, “Barnsley”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.