Gourlay
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Scottish; origin uncertain, perhaps from an unidentified place in Normandy
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Gourlay is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 488K(measured from records)
- DKDenmark1 in 1.5M
- ESSpain1 in 1.7M
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Gourlay itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- 2 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 31 (measured from records)
- 1 in 488K (inferred from the name graph)
682 people, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Гурли in RU Russia.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
Scottish; origin uncertain, perhaps from an unidentified place in Normandy.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world(measured from records)
Gourlay 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.
682 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: Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); Instate — India surnames (clean spellings) from electoral rolls; Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register). 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)
Gourlay is also recorded in 3 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, Of unknown provenance; associated with French or English places, but no direct connection found. Ingelramus de Gourlay held land c.1174.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, Scottish name, probably originally from North or South Gorley, Hampshire; first attested Ingelram de Gourlay c1174 Black
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
variant of GourdeY.
as a nameDictionary of American Family 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)
- Robert Fleming Gourlayb. 1778GBBritish statistician and activist
- James Gourlayb. 1860GBBritish association football player (1860-1939)
- Janet Gourlayb. 1863GBBritish egyptologist
- John Gourlayb. 1872CACanadian soccer player (1872-1949)
- Henry William Gourlayb. 1895NZNew Zealand botanist, school teacher and cricket umpire (1895-1970)
- Harry Gourlayb. 1916GBBritish politician (1916-1987)
- Helen Gourlayb. 1946AUAustralian tennis player
- James Gourlayb. 1954GBScottish conductor and tubist
- Candy Gourlayb. 1962PHFilipino writer
- Andrew Gourlayb. 1982JMBritish conductor
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 19 sources across 9 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 757 | #32,541 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 682 | #33,450 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 627 | #34,210 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 30 | #64,295 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 30 | #62,916 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 5 | #55,966 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 4 | #108,875 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 4 | #68,028 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
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 Gourlay mean, and where does it come from?
- Scottish; origin uncertain, perhaps from an unidentified place in Normandy. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Gourlay have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 682 people named Gourlay, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled gourlay.
- Where is Gourlay most common?
- Gourlay is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 488 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Gourlay?
- In the United States, the national register counted 682 people named Gourlay in 2010, about 1 in 488 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Gourlay?
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/gourlayThe 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, “Gourlay”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.