Tobey
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from Hebrew Tobiah ‘Jehovah is good’; first attested Tobias prior c1 142–50 PN Ess 261
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ˈtoʊbi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Tobey is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- USUnited States
- GBUnited Kingdom
- 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 Hebrew Tobiah ‘Jehovah is good’; first attested Tobias prior c1 142–50 PN Ess 261
Sources 1
- A Dictionary of English Surnames
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)
Tobey is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Croatian, američki suvremeni slikar; tašizam i kaligrafija kao stilska uporišta; primao poduku od kineskih slikara kaligrafije i zen-slikarstva; zaštitni znak mreža igličastih zakrivljenih linija što se ukrštavaju na tamnoj pozadini
as a wordHrvatski jezični portal (HJP) dictionary export
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)
- William H. Tobeyb. 1799USAmerican politician
- Edward Silas Tobeyb. 1813American businessman
- Hannah Tobey Farmerb. 1823USAmerican social reformer (abolitionist; women's rights), philanthropist, writer (1823-1891)
- Charles W. Tobeyb. 1880USAmerican politician (1880-1953)
- Mark Tobeyb. 1890USAmerican painter (1890–1976)
- David Tobeyb. 1898USAmerican basketball player (1898-1988)
- Kenneth Tobeyb. 1917USAmerican actor (1917–2002)
- Ruth Tobeyb. 1929USAmerican actress
- Paul Tobeyb. 1962CAjazz pianist, composer, marketer
- Mike Tobeyb. 1994USSlovenian-American basketball 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)
Attested in 33 sources across 16 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 3.8K | #8,732 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 3.6K | #8,475 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 3.5K | #8,963 |
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 37 | #61,294 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 14 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 14 | #112,802 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 11 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 11 | #131,043 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 6 | #154,812 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 5 | #101,952 |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 5 | #53,142 |
| EC Ecuador | INEC — Visualizador de Nombres y Apellidos, per-token query API (1900–2024) | 1994 | 1 | — |
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 Tobey mean, and where does it come from?
- from Hebrew Tobiah ‘Jehovah is good’; first attested Tobias prior c1 142–50 PN Ess 261 Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- How do you pronounce Tobey?
- A machine transcription gives /ˈtoʊbi/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Tobey have the most bearers?
- Tobey is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Tobey?
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/tobeyThe 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, “Tobey”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.