Neils
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from a reduced form of the personal name Cornelius
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈniɫz/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Neils is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- GYGuyana1 in 31K(measured from records)
- KNSt. Kitts & Nevis1 in 54K
- USUnited States1 in 537K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 25 (measured from records)
- 1 in 31K (inferred from the name graph)
619 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
Guyana
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
from a reduced form of the personal name Cornelius.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Neils 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 | 619 | 1 in 537K | 888 | Neils | 20 |
| BR Brazil | 37 | 1 in 5.7M | 37 | Neils | 15 |
| GY Guyana | 24 | 1 in 31K | 24 | — | — |
| KN St. Kitts & Nevis | 1 | 1 in 54K | 1 | — | — |
| PE Peru | — | — | — | Neils | 25 |
| DO Dominican Republic | — | — | — | Neils | 2 |
619 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; St Kitts & Nevis — Register of Electors 2026. 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)
Neils is also recorded in 2 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In German, variant of Neill, with English patronymic -s.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
In Latvian, Vīrieša vārds
as a wordTēzaurs.lv (Dictionary and Thesaurus of Latvian, AiLab / LU MII)
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)
- Steve Neilsb. 1951USAmerican football 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 23 sources across 12 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 888 | #28,554 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 619 | #36,204 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 618 | #34,630 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 37 | #129,205 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 24 | #601 |
| KN St. Kitts & Nevis | St Kitts & Nevis — Register of Electors 2026 | 2026 | 1 | #181 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 Neils mean, and where does it come from?
- from a reduced form of the personal name Cornelius. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Neils?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈniɫz/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Neils have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 619 people named Neils, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled neils.
- Where is Neils most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Neils is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 31 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Neils?
- In the United States, the national register counted 619 people named Neils in 2010, about 1 in 537 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Neils?
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/neilsThe 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, “Neils”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.