Moodie
surname · Latin script
Meaning: From a medieval nickname for a courageous or quick-tempered person, from Middle English madie ‘bold, impetuous, angry’ (Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history])
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 9 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Moodie is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in South Africa than in any other country.
- JMJamaica≈1 in 11Kfew records(inferred from the name graph)
- AUAustralia≈1 in 31K
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 33Kfew records
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- South Africa (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 290 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 11K (inferred from the name graph)
≈1,900 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Jamaica, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)From a medieval nickname for a courageous or quick-tempered person, from Middle English madie ‘bold, impetuous, angry’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where the surname Moodie is found
(measured from records)Moodie 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZA South Africa | — | ≈1,900 est. | ≈1 in 33K | — | Moodie | 40 |
| US United States | — | 1,715 | 1 in 194K | 1.8K | Moodie | 290 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | ≈1,200 est. | ≈1 in 59K | — | Moodie | 144 |
| AU Australia | — | ≈890 est. | ≈1 in 31K | — | Moodie | 118 |
| CA Canada | — | ≈600 est. | ≈1 in 69K | — | Moodie | 107 |
| JM Jamaica | #637 | ≈270 est. | ≈1 in 11K | — | Moodie | 12 |
| NZ New Zealand | — | ≈140 est. | ≈1 in 37K | — | Moodie | 53 |
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; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020. 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)Moodie 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.
Scottish spelling of Moody.
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)- Alma Moodieb. 1898AUAustralian musician (1898–1943)
- Andrew Moodieb. 1967CACanadian stage and film actor and playwright based in Ontario
- Tanya Moodieb. 1972GBBritish actress
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)18 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 9 countries.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- What does the name Moodie mean, and where does it come from?
- From a medieval nickname for a courageous or quick-tempered person, from Middle English madie ‘bold, impetuous, angry’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- Which countries have the most people with the surname Moodie?
- Mondonomo estimates about 1.9 thousand people named Moodie in South Africa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled moodie. After it come United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada; the country table on this page ranks them.
- How common is the name Moodie?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,715 people named Moodie in 2010, about 1 in 194 thousand residents.
- How common is Moodie compared with other names?
- In Jamaica, Moodie is the 637th most common surname of 50,451 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Moodie?
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/moodieThe 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, “Moodie” — the 637th most common surname in Jamaica. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.