Tallis
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Either from an unidentified place with a name based on Anglo-Norman taillis 'woodland clearing', or an invented Jewish name based on Yiddish tales 'prayer shawl'
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 15 countries · latest register: Census Bureau, 2020
Tallis is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United Kingdom than in any other country.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 150K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 1.4M
- NLNetherlands≈1 in 3.7M
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United Kingdom (inferred from the name graph)
- Record sources
- 147 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 130K (inferred from the name graph)
≈440 people, est.
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Australia, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)Either from an unidentified place with a name based on Anglo-Norman taillis 'woodland clearing', or an invented Jewish name based on Yiddish tales 'prayer shawl'.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world
(measured from records)Tallis 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | ≈440 est. | ≈1 in 150K | 800 | Tallis | 110 |
| US United States | 233 | 1 in 1.4M | 250 | Tallis | 147 |
| AU Australia | ≈200 est. | ≈1 in 130K | 1 | Tallis | 63 |
| BR Brazil | ≈76 est. | ≈1 in 2.8M | 669 | Tallis | 48 |
| CA Canada | ≈75 est. | ≈1 in 504K | 1 | Tallis | 43 |
| NO Norway | 22 | 1 in 249K | 22 | Tallis | 8 |
| IE Ireland | ≈10 est. | ≈1 in 500K | — | Tallis | 11 |
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; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, 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)Tallis 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, Thomas, English composer
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
In Catalan, second-person singular present subjunctive of tallar
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Croatian, engleski skladatelj, orguljaš kraljevske kapele, tiskar nota i spisa o glazbi, autor prvih skladbi anglikanske crkvene glazbe na engleskom jeziku
as a wordHrvatski jezični portal (HJP) dictionary export
In Basque, ( S ) Ref.: A ( taillis ); Lrq [oxítona]. . "Claro, lugar despoblado de árboles. Oihan handi batetan zühain-paket bat saldürik musten tienean, gune hartan urthe zunbaitez kabaleak defendatzen tiñe eta gune hura dün taillisa deitzen (S)" A . "Taillis de bois" Lrq .
as a wordOrotariko Euskal Hiztegia (OEH) — General/Historical Basque Dictionary, Euskaltzaindia
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)- Thomas Tallisb. 1505GBEnglish composer
- John Tallisb. 1817GBBritish cartographer
- Sir George Tallisb. 1869IE(1869-1948) theatrical entrepreneur
- Cedric Tallisb. 1914USAmerican baseball executive (1914-1991)
- John Howard Tallisb. 1933GBBritish ecologist (1933 - )
- Sonja Tallisb. 1943AUAustralian actor-singer
- Frank Tallisb. 1958GBBritish psychologist, essayist and novelist
- Gorden Tallisb. 1973AUAustralian rugby league footballer and administrator
- Rayden Tallisb. 1975Australian rules footballer
- Zaalen Tallisfilm composer
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)27 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 15 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 800 | #7,911 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 250 | #81,574 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 236 | #75,938 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 233 | #81,181 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 35 | #134,170 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 22 | #40,358 |
| 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
- 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 Tallis mean, and where does it come from?
- Either from an unidentified place with a name based on Anglo-Norman taillis 'woodland clearing', or an invented Jewish name based on Yiddish tales 'prayer shawl'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Tallis have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 438 people named Tallis in the United Kingdom, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled tallis.
- How common is the name Tallis?
- In the United States, the national register counted 233 people named Tallis in 2010, about 1 in 1.4 million residents.
What do you want to know about Tallis?
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/tallisThe 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, “Tallis”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.