Fereday
surname · Latin script
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 3 countries · latest register: Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines, 2025
Fereday is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States. Recorded meaning: Ferry 1. English: metonymic occupational name for a fer¬ ‘descendant of Fearadach’, a personal name apparently composed of old Celt, elements meaning ‘man’ + ‘wood’.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
- AUAustralia
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)Ferry 1. English: metonymic occupational name for a fer¬ ‘descendant of Fearadach’, a personal name apparently composed of old Celt, elements meaning ‘man’ + ‘wood’. ryman, or topographic name for someone who lived by a ferry crossing on a river. ME feri ferry is from ON ferja ferry, ultimately cogn. with the OE verb ferian to carry. Var.: Faraday. Fertig Fieback 181 2. Irish: Anglicized form of Gael. C) Fearadhaigh ‘des¬ cendant of Fearadhach’, a personal name of uncertain ori¬ gin, probably an adj. deriv. of fear man. Vars. (of i): Ferrey, Ferrie; Ferriman, Ferryman; Ferrier. Cogn. (of i): Du.: Veerman.
Cited for this meaning 3
- A dictionary of surnames
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- The Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
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).
Notable people with this name
(measured from records)- Susan Feredayb. 1815GBBritish born Australian algologist, botanical illustrator and artist (1815-1878)
- Richard William Feredayb. 1820NZNew Zealand lawyer, entomologist and artist (1820 - 1899)
- Wayne Feredayb. 1963GBprofessional footballer (born 1963)
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)8 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 3 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 269 | #76,963 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 267 | #72,771 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 237 | #75,695 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025) | 2025 | 1 | #261 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 Fereday mean?
- Recorded meaning: Ferry 1. English: metonymic occupational name for a fer¬ ‘descendant of Fearadach’, a personal name apparently composed of old Celt, elements meaning ‘man’ + ‘wood’.
- In which country does Fereday have the most bearers?
- Fereday is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Fereday?
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/feredayThe 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, “Fereday”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.