Brearley
surname · Latin script
Meaning: person from Brierley or Brierly, names of places in England ('glade where briars grow')
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 4 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
/bɹɑɹʎi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Brearley is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- AUAustralia
- USUnited States
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 Brierley or Brierly, names of places in England ('glade where briars grow').
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
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)Brearley 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 English, A hamlet in Hebden Royd parish, Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale, West Yorkshire, England (OS grid ref SE0225).
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)- David Brearleyb. 1745USNew Jersey Supreme Court justice
- Herman Brearleyb. 1801GBEnglish organist
- Harry Brearleyb. 1871GBInventor of stainless steel (1871–1948)
- Walter Brearleyb. 1876GBCricket player of England. (1876-1937)
- Norman Brearleyb. 1890AUAustralian pioneer aviator
- Horace Brearleyb. 1913GBEnglish County cricketer (1913-2007)
- Alex Brearleyb. 1913GBBritish canoeist (1913–2001)
- Mike Brearleyb. 1942GBcricket player of England (born 1942)
- Peter Brearleyb. 1975CACanadian ice hockey player
- Liam Brearleyb. 2003CACanadian snowboarder
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)11 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 543 | #40,313 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 537 | #43,339 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 516 | #40,019 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 17 | #91,572 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 1 | #23,184 |
| 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 Brearley mean, and where does it come from?
- person from Brierley or Brierly, names of places in England ('glade where briars grow'). Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Brearley?
- A machine transcription gives /bɹɑɹʎi/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Brearley have the most bearers?
- Brearley is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Brearley?
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/brearleyThe 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, “Brearley”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.