Percy
given name · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Person from Percy’, a place-name in northern France
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/perkai/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Percy is a given name written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country.
- PEPeru≈1 in 525(inferred from the name graph)
- ZASouth Africa≈1 in 4K
- PHPhilippines≈1 in 24K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 392 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 525 (inferred from the name graph)
≈150,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Peru, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘Person from Percy’, a place-name in northern France.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Often considered alongside
Names that people choosing a name often weigh against Percy, most often first. They share a style rather than an origin.
From the names suggested together in public name-advice forums, in English. A list of what people consider, not a measure of how common any name is.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Percy 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈150,000 est. | ≈1 in 9.2K | — | Percy | 24 |
| PE Peru | — | ≈61,000 est. | ≈1 in 525 | — | Percy | 76 |
| ZA South Africa | #656 | ≈14,000 est. | ≈1 in 4K | — | Percy | 72 |
| US United States | — | 10,913 | 1 in 30K | 11K | Percy | 392 |
| PH Philippines | — | ≈4,600 est. | ≈1 in 24K | — | Percy | 51 |
| SE Sweden | — | 1,409 | 1 in 7.2K | 1.4K | Percy | 42 |
| HK Hong Kong | — | ≈810 est. | ≈1 in 8.9K | — | Percy | 33 |
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; Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population). 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)
Percy is also recorded in 5 other lexicons, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In English, from Percy-en-Auge, Calvados; first attested William de Perci 1086 DB
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, An English surname from Old French.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, short form of Percival
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
In German, ['pa:si]: im 19. Jh. aus dem Englischen übernommener männl.
as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen
[Ignoto]
as a nameIl grande libro dei nomi per bebè. Significato, origini, curiosità. Oltre 7000 nomi per bambine e bambini Significato,…
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)
- Percy Bysshe Shelleyb. 1792GBBritish Romantic poet (1792–1822)
- Percy Fawcettb. 1867GBBritish explorer, anthropologist and archaeologist (1867–1925)
- Walter Chryslerb. 1875USnot in their usual name(1875-1940) American automotive industry executive
- Percy Williams Bridgmanb. 1882USAmerican physicist
- Percy Graingerb. 1882USAustralian-born composer, arranger and pianist (1882–1961)
- Charles Percy Snowb. 1905GBEnglish novelist and physical chemist (1905–1980)
- Percy Herbertb. 1920GBBritish actor (1920-1992)
- Dickie Jonesb. 1927USnot in their usual nameAmerican actor and singer (1927-2014)
- Steve Harrisb. 1956GBnot in their usual nameBritish bassist
- Percy Hynes Whiteb. 2001CACanadian actor
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)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 86 sources across 47 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 11K | #2,330 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 1.4K | #1,347 |
| SE Sweden | SCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023) | 2020 | 485 | — |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 345 | #2,330 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 154 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2025 | 10 | — |
Reference works 6
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia given-name tokens
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)
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 are other forms of the name Percy?
- In the etymology graph, Peter and Parsifal are forms of the same name in other languages.
- Is Percy a male or female name?
- Percy is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- What does the name Percy mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Person from Percy’, a place-name in northern France. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Percy?
- A machine transcription gives /perkai/ (IPA) for Spanish.
- In which country does Percy have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 152 thousand people named Percy in China, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled percy.
- How common is the name Percy?
- In the United States, the national register counted 10,913 people named Percy in 2020, about 1 in 30 thousand residents.
- How common is Percy compared with other names?
- In South Africa, Percy is the 656th most common given name of 189,620 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Percy?
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/percyThe 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, “Percy” — the 656th most common given name in South Africa. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.