Kales
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from a vernacular form of the Latin personal name Calixtus (see Kalista)
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/keɪls/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kales is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 170Kas Cales(measured from records)
- KEKenya≈1 in 234K
- ATAustria≈1 in 244K
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 Kales 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
- 143 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 234K (inferred from the name graph)
1,953 named Cales, 2010
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Kenya, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
Locally spelled Kaleş in TR Türkiye.
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)
from a vernacular form of the Latin personal name Calixtus (see Kalista).
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kales 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 | 1,953as Cales | 1 in 170K | 2K | Kales | 143 |
| NL Netherlands | 427as Kalis | 1 in 40K | 427 | Kales | 12 |
| BR Brazil | 337as Cales | 1 in 628K | 337 | — | — |
| KE Kenya | ≈230 est. | ≈1 in 234K | — | Kales | 6 |
| TR Türkiye | ≈220 est. | ≈1 in 367K | — | Kaleş | 14 |
| PL Poland | 164as Kalis | 1 in 233K | 89 | — | 1 |
| AT Austria | ≈36 est. | ≈1 in 244K | — | Kales | 9 |
| CZ Czechia | 18 | 1 in 595K | 18 | — | — |
1,953 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010, counting the spelling cales. 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; CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames); MVČR — living population register 2017. 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)
Kales is also recorded in 4 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In German, Wahrscheinlich patronymischer starker Genitiv zu Ka(h)l(e); im Text Raum Aachen–Köln–Düsseldorf.
as a nameDeutscher Familiennamenatlas, Band 5: Familiennamen nach Beruf und persönlichen Merkmalen
In Lithuanian, accusative plural of kalė̃ (“bitch”)
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Dutch, Calais, a city in the North of France
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In kw, hard, tough (resistant to pressure)
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)
- Albert M. Kalesb. 1875USAmerican legal writer
- Frank Kalesb. 1942NLDutch basketball 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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 14 sources across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 265 | #73,215 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 240 | #74,957 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 220 | #90,184 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 43 | #34,062 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 26 | #164,002 |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 4 | #129,442 |
| CZ Czechia | KdeJsme.cz — četnost jmen a příjmení (MVČR population register front-end) | — | 4 | #21,864 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Kales mean, and where does it come from?
- from a vernacular form of the Latin personal name Calixtus (see Kalista). Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Kales?
- A machine transcription gives /keɪls/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Kales have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 2.0 thousand people named Cales, more than in any other country we hold.
- How common is the name Kales?
- In Czechia, the national register counted 18 people named Kales, about 1 in 595 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Kales?
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/kalesThe 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, “Kales”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.