Leland

loc · Latin script

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

Leland is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States. Recorded meaning: Mainly U.S.: transferred use of the surname, in origin a local name for someone who lived by a patch of fallow land, from Middle English Jay, ley ‘fallow’ + land ‘land’.

rarermore common
  • USUnited States
  • GBUnited Kingdom
  • CNChina

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.

United States (inferred from the name graph)

no count published

Sources
432 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

Mainly U.S.: transferred use of the surname, in origin a local name for someone who lived by a patch of fallow land, from Middle English Jay, ley ‘fallow’ + land ‘land’. The surname is well established in the United States. It was borne by the humorous writer Charles Leland (1824-1903), author of The Breitmann Ballads, and it is also the name of a city in Mississippi.

Sources 1

  • A concise dictionary of first names

Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Leland counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Where Leland is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—29KLeland432
GB United Kingdom—5Leland71
CN China——Leland14
RU Russia——Leland12
NO Norway—258—20
GY Guyana—42—3
FI Finland—30—2

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 — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); NISRA — Baby names Northern Ireland full list (1997–present); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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 names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Leland is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate name4 spellings in the group

    Also written Léland

  • a separate name2 spellings in the group

    Also written Λιλαντ

50 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses(measured from records)

Leland 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 English, Reduced form of McClelland.

    as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

  • In English, Old English; from the meadowland

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

  • reduced form of McClellan or McLelland.

    as a nameDictionary of American Family Names

  • De la pradera

    as a name25,000 nombres de bebé. La mejor guía para escoger el nombre adecuado

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)

18001850190019502000Leland Stanford, b. 1824Henry M. Leland, b. 1843Leland Hayward, b. 1902Walter Cronkite, b. 1916David Leland, b. 1941Mike Post, b. 1944Leland Sklar, b. 1947Leland Orser, b. 1960Leland Devon Melvin, b. 1964Young Metro, b. 1993
  • Leland Stanfordb. 1824USAmerican politician and railroad tycoon (1824-1893)
  • Henry M. Lelandb. 1843USAmerican engineer, machinist, and entrepreneur (1843–1932)
  • Leland Haywardb. 1902USAmerican talent agent and theatrical producer (1902-1971)
  • Walter Cronkiteb. 1916USnot in their usual nameAmerican broadcast journalist (1916-2009)
  • David Lelandb. 1941GBBritish actor, screenwriter and director
  • Mike Postb. 1944USnot in their usual nameAmerican composer and record producer
  • Leland Sklarb. 1947USAmerican bassist and session musician
  • Leland Orserb. 1960USAmerican actor
  • Leland Devon Melvinb. 1964USNASA astronaut and engineer
  • Young Metrob. 1993USnot in their usual nameAmerican record producer (born 1993)

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 39 sources across 20 countries.

Official registers attesting Leland
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020104.8K#6,921
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020004.7K#6,671
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020204.5K#7,102
NO NorwaySSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population)—258#6,005
US United Stateswru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.)———

Reference works 5

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • 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 Leland mean, and where does it come from?
Mainly U.S.: transferred use of the surname, in origin a local name for someone who lived by a patch of fallow land, from Middle English Jay, ley ‘fallow’ + land ‘land’. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names.
In which country does Leland have the most bearers?
Leland is most frequently recorded in the United States, where it is most often spelled leland.

What do you want to know about Leland?

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

Please leave out anyone's personal details (see Privacy).

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

The same 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), and bulk access is licensed separately.

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, “Leland”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Leland parses inside a full name →