Blackie
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) Little Black; (ii) from a medieval Scottish nickname for someone with dark eyes or thought to have the evil eye
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈbɫæki/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Blackie is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United Kingdom than in any other country.
- AUAustralia≈1 in 73K(inferred from the name graph)
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 86K
- USUnited States1 in 697K
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
- 165 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 30K (inferred from the name graph)
≈760 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Sierra Leone, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
(i) Little Black; (ii) from a medieval Scottish nickname for someone with dark eyes or thought to have the evil eye.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Blackie 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 | ≈760 est. | ≈1 in 86K | listed | Blackie | 153 |
| ZA South Africa | ≈680 est. | ≈1 in 83K | — | Blackie | 24 |
| US United States | 477 | 1 in 697K | 486 | Blackie | 165 |
| AU Australia | ≈350 est. | ≈1 in 73K | — | Blackie | 75 |
| NG Nigeria | ≈310 est. | ≈1 in 687K | — | Blackie | 14 |
| SL Sierra Leone | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 30K | 1 | — | 3 |
| NZ New Zealand | ≈88 est. | ≈1 in 56K | — | Blackie | 42 |
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; NEC/ECSL — 2018 Local Council, Chairperson and Mayor nominated candidates. 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)
Blackie is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, nickname ‘black eye’, or from a placename meaning ‘dweller by the black low-lying land or enclosure’; first attested Henry Blackeye 1275 RH (Norfolk)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, A diminutive or familiar form of Black; not recorded before the 16th century.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, (i) Henry Blackeye 1275 RH (Nf); Roger Blakheye 1327 SRSf. A nickname, ‘black eye’, unless these are from place-names where the preposition has been lost. If so, ‘dweller by the black low-lying land or enclosure’, OE ēg or (ge)hæg. (ii) John Blakye 1506 Black. A Scottish diminutive of BLACK.
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
A diminutive or familiar form of Black, not on record before the 16th century, when John Blakye is listed in a Dunkeld record of 1506. John Stuart Blackie (1809–95), first Professor of Celtic at Edinburgh University, was a champion of Gaelic culture. The firm of Blackie, established in 1809 by John Blackie and Partners, was an independent publisher until 1991. Blain, see MacBlain
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, Alternative spelling of blacky.
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)
- John Blackieb. 1782GBScottish publisher (1782-1874)
- John Blackieb. 1805GBScottish publisher and provost; (1805-1873)
- John Stuart Blackieb. 1809GBScottish scholar and man of letters (1809–1895)
- Walter Graham Blackieb. 1816Scottish cartographer
- George Stodart Blackieb. 1834USScottish physician and botanist who practiced in Tennessee, United States (1834-1881)
- Ernest Blackieb. 1867GBBritish bishop
- Margery Blackieb. 1898GBBritish homeopath
- Esther Blackieb. 1916NZcricketer (1916-1991)
- Dot Blackieb. 1967GBBritish rower
- Charles BlackieNZNew Zealand jurist
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)
Attested in 20 sources across 9 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 486 | #47,112 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 477 | #44,957 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 467 | #43,546 |
| SL Sierra Leone | NEC/ECSL — 2018 Local Council, Chairperson and Mayor nominated candidates | 2018 | 1 | #33 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of English Surnames (Reaney & Wilson, 1991) | — | — | — |
| GB United Kingdom | Scottish Surnames (Ross, 1994) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Blackie mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) Little Black; (ii) from a medieval Scottish nickname for someone with dark eyes or thought to have the evil eye. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Blackie?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈbɫæki/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Blackie have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 761 people named Blackie in the United Kingdom, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled blackie.
- How common is the name Blackie?
- In the United States, the national register counted 477 people named Blackie in 2010, about 1 in 697 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Blackie?
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/blackieThe 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, “Blackie”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.