Hays
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Person from a place called Hayes, ‘enclosures’ or ‘brushwood’; or ‘son of Hay’; or from Irish Gaelic 6 hAodha, descendant of Aodh ‘fire’
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Hays is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In Ireland it is the 53rd most common surname.
- IEIreland≈1 in 979as Hayes(inferred from the name graph)
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 1.5Kas Hayes
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 1.5Kas Hayes
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 Hays 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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- #384 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 568 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 623 (inferred from the name graph)
≈790,000 named Hayes, est.
of 19M surnames
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
North Korea, est., as Hayes
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Hayes in US United States, GB United Kingdom, AU Australia and 5 more.
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)
Person from a place called Hayes, ‘enclosures’ or ‘brushwood’; or ‘son of Hay’; or from Irish Gaelic 6 hAodha, descendant of Aodh ‘fire’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Hays 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈790,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.8K | — | Hayes | 42 |
| US United States | #83 | 194,246as Hayes | 1 in 1.7K | 194K | Hayes | 568 |
| GB United Kingdom | #100 | ≈44,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | 3 | Hayes | 291 |
| KP North Korea | #55 | ≈41,000 est. | ≈1 in 623 | — | Hayes | 4 |
| IT Italy | #137 | ≈19,000 est. | ≈1 in 3.2K | 1 | Hayes | 43 |
| AU Australia | #96 | ≈17,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | 1 | Hayes | 251 |
| IE Ireland | #53 | ≈5,300 est. | ≈1 in 979 | — | Hayes | 150 |
| NZ New Zealand | #86 | ≈3,300 est. | ≈1 in 1.5K | 27 | Hayes | 121 |
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; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); ISTAT — Contanomi newborn per-name series (1999–2024, JSONP backend); DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present). 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)
Hays 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 yol, alternative form of his
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)
- Barton S. Haysb. 1826USAmerican artist (1826-1914)
- Charles Haysb. 1834USAmerican politician and Confederate Army officer (1834-1879)
- Will H. Haysb. 1879USAmerican politician (1879–1954)
- Lee Haysb. 1914USAmerican folk singer and songwriter (1914-1981)
- Kathryn Haysb. 1933USAmerican actress
- Robert Haysb. 1947USAmerican actor
- Richard B. Haysb. 1948USAmerican theologian
- Lauren Haysb. 1968USAmerican actress and singer
- Todd Haysb. 1969USAmerican bobsledder
- Austin Haysb. 1995USAmerican baseball player
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 27 sources across 14 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 34K | #1,021 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 33K | #964 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 33K | #1,046 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- 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 Hays mean, and where does it come from?
- Person from a place called Hayes, ‘enclosures’ or ‘brushwood’; or ‘son of Hay’; or from Irish Gaelic 6 hAodha, descendant of Aodh ‘fire’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Hays have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 791 thousand people named Hayes in China, more than in any other country we hold.
- How common is the name Hays?
- In the United States, the national register counted 194,246 people named Hayes in 2010, about 1 in 1.7 thousand residents.
- How common is Hays compared with other names?
- In Ireland, Hays is the 53rd most common surname of 73,729 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Hays?
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/haysThe 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, “Hays” — the 53rd most common surname in Ireland. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.