Selway
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from the medieval male personal name Salewi, probably from an unrecorded Old English Sflwf,g literally 'prosperity-war'
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 4 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Selway is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- AUAustralia
- CACanada
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)from the medieval male personal name Salewi, probably from an unrecorded Old English Sflwf,g literally 'prosperity-war'
Cited for this meaning 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)Selway is also recorded in 3 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 an unattested OE personal name, *Scelwlg, composed of the elements seel good fortune (cf. Sealey) + wig war. Vars.: Sal(la)way, Salloway, Salwey.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, Pyrenees, so called from the Gaul, personal name Senos (from the root sen- old) + the local suffix -acum. Selmini see Ansell
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A surname transferred from the given name.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)- Robert Selwayb. 1902USUnited States Army Air Forces officer (1902–1967)
- George Selwayb. 1924GBBritish actor (1924-1994)
- Mary Selwayb. 1936GBBritish casting director (1936–2004)
- John Selwayb. 1938GBBritish painter (1938–2017)
- Freda Brierleyb. 1942NZnot in their usual nameNew Zealand textile artist
- Bradley Selwayb. 1955AUAustralian judge
- Phil Selwayb. 1967GBEnglish drummer
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)12 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 1.5K | #4,805 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 481 | #47,529 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 441 | #47,966 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 399 | #49,471 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 14 | #101,339 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 2 | #156,519 |
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 Selway mean, and where does it come from?
- from the medieval male personal name Salewi, probably from an unrecorded Old English Sflwf,g literally 'prosperity-war' Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Selway have the most bearers?
- Selway is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Selway?
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/selwayThe 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, “Selway”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.