Flay
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from OE fleah 'flea', or OE flēoge 'a flying insect'; first attested William Fleie 1233 FeuDu
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Flay is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 3.1M(measured from records)
- ESSpain1 in 4.2M
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 27 (measured from records)
- 1 in 3.1M (inferred from the name graph)
106 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from OE fleah 'flea', or OE flēoge 'a flying insect'; first attested William Fleie 1233 FeuDu
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Flay 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 106 | 1 in 3.1M | 139 | Flay | 13 |
| ES Spain | 12 | 1 in 4.2M | 12 | Flay | 7 |
| BR Brazil | — | — | 61 | Flay | 27 |
| MX Mexico | — | — | — | Flay | 10 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | — | — | Flay | 7 |
| AO Angola | — | — | — | Flay | 3 |
| CL Chile | — | — | — | Flay | 7 |
| GT Guatemala | — | — | — | Flay | 1 |
106 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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; IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos). 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)
Flay 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, To cause to fly; put to flight; drive off (by frightening).
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)
- Jennifer Flayb. 1959NZFrench art dealer
- Bobby Flayb. 1964USAmerican celebrity chef, restaurateur and reality television personality
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 12 sources across 5 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 139 | #128,411 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 132 | #121,058 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 106 | #153,769 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 43 | #116,436 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 12 | #109,635 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 1
- 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 Flay mean, and where does it come from?
- from OE fleah 'flea', or OE flēoge 'a flying insect'; first attested William Fleie 1233 FeuDu Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- In which country does Flay have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 106 people named Flay, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled flay.
- Where is Flay most common?
- Flay is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 3.1 million people carrying it.
- How common is the name Flay?
- In the United States, the national register counted 106 people named Flay in 2010, about 1 in 3.1 million residents.
What do you want to know about Flay?
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/flayThe 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, “Flay”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.