Thornley
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from Thornley (Durham, Lancashire); first attested Nelle de Thornleye 1274 Wak (Yorkshire)
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ˈθɔɹnɫi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Thornley is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- AUAustralia
- USUnited States
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 Thornley (Durham, Lancashire); first attested Nelle de Thornleye 1274 Wak (Yorkshire)
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
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)
Thornley 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, A placename:
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, A different form of Thorley.
as a nameEncyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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 Thornleyb. 1781GBBritish politician
- Isobel D. Thornleyb. 1893GBEnglish historian (1893-1941)
- Paul Thornleyb. 1944CACanadian snooker player
- Peter Thornleyb. 1946GBBritish professional wrestler
- Barry Thornleyb. 1948GBEnglish footballer (born 1948)
- Paul Thornleyb. 1950GBBritish actor
- Ian Thornleyb. 1972CACanadian musician
- Ben Thornleyb. 1975GBEnglish association football player (born 1975)
- Victoria Thornleyb. 1987GBBritish rower
- Simon ThornleyNZNew Zealand epidemiologist and biostatistician
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)
Attested in 18 sources across 10 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 3.7K | #2,146 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.7K | #16,624 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.6K | #16,955 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.6K | #16,494 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 38 | #54,606 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 38 | #53,553 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 3 | — |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 3 | #154,370 |
| CZ Czechia | MVČR — living population register 2017 | — | 3 | #149,641 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 3 | #293,884 |
| BE Belgium | Familienaam.be — Belgian family-name frequency (population register) | 2008 | 1 | #172,395 |
| 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 given-name 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 Thornley mean, and where does it come from?
- from Thornley (Durham, Lancashire); first attested Nelle de Thornleye 1274 Wak (Yorkshire) Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- How do you pronounce Thornley?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈθɔɹnɫi/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Thornley have the most bearers?
- Thornley is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Thornley?
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/thornleyThe 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, “Thornley”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.