Gillis

surname · Latin script

Meaning: From the Scottish Gaelic personal name Gilla Iosa, literally ‘servant of Jesus’

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

/ˈɡɪɫɪs/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated

Gillis is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.

rarermore common
  • CACanada
  • USUnited States
  • GBUnited Kingdom

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.

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

From the Scottish Gaelic personal name Gilla Iosa, literally ‘servant of Jesus’.

Sources 1

  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 5 languages 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)

Gillis 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.

  • reduced form of Gaelic Mac Gille losa ‘son of the servant of Jesus’. Compare McLeish. The usual spelling in Scotland is Gillies.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In Swedish, Gillis är en svensk, dansk och holländsk form av franskans Giles, latinets Gilius, ursprungligen en smekform till helgonnamnet Aegidius (av grekiskans aigís, benämningen på Zeus sköld).

    as a nameFörnamn i Sverige. Kortfattat namnlexikon

  • Dutch form of Giles.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • In Irish, The Scottish Giolla Íosa, sometimes used for MacAleese in Ireland

    as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland

  • In Swedish, a male given name, equivalent to English Giles

    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)

1850190019502000Duncan Gillis, b. 1883Joseph Gillis, b. 1911Jackson Gillis, b. 1916Ann Gillis, b. 1927Jamie Gillis, b. 1943Brad Gillis, b. 1957Jack White, b. 1975Tagaq, b. 1975Shane Gillis, b. 1987Sarah Gillis, b. 1994
  • Duncan Gillisb. 1883CACanadian hammer and discus thrower (1883–1963)
  • Joseph Gillisb. 1911GBIsraeli mathematician
  • Jackson Gillisb. 1916USAmerican screenwriter (1916–2010)
  • Ann Gillisb. 1927USAmerican actress (1927–)
  • Jamie Gillisb. 1943USAmerican pornographic actor and director (1943-2010)
  • Brad Gillisb. 1957USguitarist
  • Jack Whiteb. 1975USnot in their usual nameAmerican musician (born 1975)
  • Tagaqb. 1975CAnot in their usual nameCanadian singer and author
  • Shane Gillisb. 1987USAmerican comedian and actor (born 1987)
  • Sarah Gillisb. 1994USAmerican aerospace engineer, astronaut on Polaris Dawn space mission

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)

FormalDear Gillis,
InformalHello,

Evidence(measured from records)

Attested in 45 sources across 21 countries.

Official registers attesting Gillis
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010201019K#1,910
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000200018K#1,786
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020202018K#2,014
BE BelgiumFamilienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register)20082.3K#420
BE BelgiumStatbel — Noms de famille (family names)—2.1K#468
NL NetherlandsCBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007)2007282#7,347
GY GuyanaGuyana — Official List of Electors July 20252025172#453
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—56#96,827
ES SpainINE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal)—49#45,701
ES SpainINE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos)—49#45,014
FR FranceINSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000)199132—
CH SwitzerlandBFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames)202414#47,506

Reference works 6

  • 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 given-name tokens
  • 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 Gillis mean, and where does it come from?
From the Scottish Gaelic personal name Gilla Iosa, literally ‘servant of Jesus’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
How do you pronounce Gillis?
A machine transcription gives /ˈɡɪɫɪs/ (IPA) for English.
What are other forms of the name Gillis?
In the etymology graph, Gil, Giles and Gyles are forms of the same name in other languages.
In which country does Gillis have the most bearers?
Gillis is most frequently recorded in the United States.

What do you want to know about Gillis?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/gillis

The 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, “Gillis”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Gillis parses inside a full name →