Sorley
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Scottish (Highland) and Irish: Anglicized form of the Gaelic name Somhairle (pronounced ‘sorr-lee’)
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 8 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
/sɔɹɫi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Sorley is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- USUnited States
- CACanada
- GBUnited Kingdom
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)Scottish (Highland) and Irish: Anglicized form of the Gaelic name Somhairle (pronounced ‘sorr-lee’). See >Somerled.
Cited for this meaning 1
- A concise dictionary of first names
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)Sorley 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 English, Old Norse; the summer traveller
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
Scottish (Highland) and Irish: Anglicized form of Gaelic Somhairle ; see SOMERLED .
as a word
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)- Edward Sorleyb. 1871GBBritish actor (1871-1933)
- Ralph Sorleyb. 1898GBRoyal Air Force air marshals
- Lewis Sorleyb. 1934USAmerican historian
- Clark Sorleyb. 1956GBScottish record producer
- Kevin Sorleyb. 1993CACanadian ice sledge hockey 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)20 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 8 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 324 | #66,015 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 294 | #63,450 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 287 | #68,547 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 124 | #28,950 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Sorley come from?
- Scottish (Highland) and Irish: Anglicized form of the Gaelic name Somhairle (pronounced ‘sorr-lee’). See >Somerled. Recorded by A concise dictionary of first names.
- How do you pronounce Sorley?
- A machine transcription gives /sɔɹɫi/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Sorley mean?
- Recorded meaning: Scottish (Highland) and Irish: Anglicized form of the Gaelic name Somhairle (pronounced ‘sorr-lee’).
- In which country does Sorley have the most bearers?
- Sorley is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Sorley?
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/sorleyThe 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, “Sorley”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.