Mellish
surname · Latin script
Meaning: person from Melhuish, Devon; 'brightly coloured (i.e
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Mellish is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
- AUAustralia
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.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
person from Melhuish, Devon; 'brightly coloured (i.e. flowery) area of land'
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)
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)
Mellish 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 English, habitational name from Melhuish in Devon, so called from Old English mal(e) ‘brightly colored’, ‘flowery’ + hiwisc ‘hide’ (a measurement of land).
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)
- Joseph Mellishb. 1717British Member of Parliament (died 1790)
- William Mellishb. 1764GBEnglish Tory politician and Governor of the Bank of England
- Joseph Charles Mellishb. 1768GBEnglish diplomat, poet and translator
- David B. Mellishb. 1831USAmerican politician (1831-1874)
- Edward Mellishb. 1880GBEnglish military chaplain (1880–1962); recipient of the Victoria Cross
- Frank Mellishb. 1897ZASouth African rugby union footballer
- Arthur Preston Mellishb. 1905CACanadian mathematician (*1905 – †1930)
- Bob Mellish, Baron Mellishb. 1913GBBritish politician (1913–1998)
- Jon Mellishb. 1997GBEnglish association football player (born 1997)
- Ben Mellishactor
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 15 sources across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 548 | #42,600 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 513 | #40,203 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 505 | #42,858 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 6 | #154,812 |
| DK Denmark | Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts) | — | 4 | #66,051 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 3 | #126,303 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #365,442 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 1 | #84,012 |
| US United States | wru 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
- 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
- Where does the name Mellish come from?
- person from Melhuish, Devon; 'brightly coloured (i.e. flowery) area of land' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- What does the name Mellish mean?
- Recorded meaning: person from Melhuish, Devon; 'brightly coloured (i.e.
- In which country does Mellish have the most bearers?
- Mellish is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Mellish?
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/mellishThe 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, “Mellish”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.