Garvey
surname · Latin script
Meaning: From Irish Gaelic Ó Gairbhshlnt, ‘descendant of Gairbhshlnth’, a personal name meaning ‘cruel peace’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Garvey is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- IEIreland
- GBUnited Kingdom
- 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)
From Irish Gaelic Ó Gairbhshlnt, ‘descendant of Gairbhshlnth’, a personal name meaning ‘cruel peace’.
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)
Garvey 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, O Gairbith ‘rough peace’; sept of Armagh, Down and Donegal.
as a nameIrish family names
reduced Anglicized form of Gaelic 6 Gairbhshith ‘descendant of Gairbhshith', a personal name from garbh ‘rough’, ‘cruel’ -I- sith ‘peace’. See also McGarvey.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In English, A type of boat which was originally flat-bottomed, reminiscent of a sled, and historically sailed around New Jersey.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, black-nationalist leader; Steven,
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In English, black-nationalist leader
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
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)
- Dan Edward Garveyb. 1886USAmerican politician (1886-1974)
- Marcus Garveyb. 1887JMJamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur (1887-1940)
- Amy Ashwood Garveyb. 1897JMJamaican Pan-Africanist activist
- Terence Garveyb. 1915GBBritish diplomat
- Steve Garveyb. 1948USAmerican professional baseball player (born 1948)
- Damien Garveyb. 1960AUAustralian actor
- Adrian Garveyb. 1968ZWSouth African rugby union footballer
- Kate Garveyb. 1970GBBritish public relations executive
- Rea Garveyb. 1973IEIrish singer, songwriter, record producer and guitarist
- Guy Garveyb. 1974GBEnglish singer, songwriter and radio presenter
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 36 sources across 20 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 11K | #3,196 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 11K | #2,981 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 11K | #3,185 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 50 | #44,869 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 50 | #44,350 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 40 | #2,455 |
| KN St. Kitts & Nevis | St Kitts & Nevis — Register of Electors 2026 | 2026 | 25 | #157 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 22 | #41,401 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 17 | #28,426 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1991 | 8 | — |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 8 | #47,539 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1971 | 8 | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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 Garvey mean, and where does it come from?
- From Irish Gaelic Ó Gairbhshlnt, ‘descendant of Gairbhshlnth’, a personal name meaning ‘cruel peace’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Garvey have the most bearers?
- Garvey is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Garvey?
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/garveyThe 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, “Garvey”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.