Southey
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Person from Southey, a place-name meaning ‘southern enclosure’
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 4 countries · latest register: Cook Islands Electoral Rolls (2022 General Election + 2024 Pa Enua), 2022
Southey is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- ZASouth Africa
- AUAustralia
- 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)Person from Southey, a place-name meaning ‘southern enclosure’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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)Southey is also recorded in 4 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 Southey in Culmstock, Devon; first attested Peter de Suthag’ 1219 AssY
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, places, for example Southey in the parish of Culmstock, Devon, in Ecclesford, W Yorks., Southey Green in Essex, or Southey Wood in Ufford, Northants. All of these get their names from OE siib South + (ge)hceg en¬ closure (see Hay i). Var,: Southee (mainly Kent, centred on Canterbury).
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A habitational surname from Old English.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, Robert English poet
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper 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)- Robert Southeyb. 1744GBfather of the poet Robert Southey (1745-1792)
- Robert Southeyb. 1774GBEnglish romantic poet (1774–1843)
- Caroline Anne Southeyb. 1786English poet (1786-1854)
- Richard Southeyb. 1808GBBritish colonial administrator (1808-1901)
- Reginald Southeyb. 1835GBBritish doctor (1835-1899)
- Ernest G. Southeyb. 1873USAmerican architect
- Walter Southeyb. 1897GBBritish flying ace (1897-1920)
- Robert Southeyb. 1922AUAustralian businessman and politician
- Marigold Southeyb. 1928AUAustralian philanthropist
- Peter Southeyb. 1962GBEnglish footballer (1962-1983)
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 | 750 | #8,335 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 162 | #114,613 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 129 | #123,314 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 121 | #138,304 |
| CK Cook Islands | Cook Islands Electoral Rolls (2022 General Election + 2024 Pa Enua) | 2022 | 1 | #58 |
| 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
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Southey mean, and where does it come from?
- Person from Southey, a place-name meaning ‘southern enclosure’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Southey have the most bearers?
- Southey is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Southey?
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/southeyThe 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, “Southey”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.