Wardley
surname · Latin script
Meaning: from Wardley, or Wardley in Iping, Sussex; first attested William de Wardlegh 1296
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Wardley is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- USUnited States
- AUAustralia
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 Wardley, or Wardley in Iping, Sussex; first attested William de Wardlegh 1296
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)
Wardley 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, mer county of Rutland (now part of Leics.), apparently so called from OE wcer weir (see Ware i) + leak wood, clearing; the -d- does not appear before the late Vars. (of i): Wang(n)er, Wang(l)er. 13th cent., and is apparently excrescent.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A suburban area in the Metropolitan Borough of Salford, Greater Manchester, England (OS grid ref SD7602).
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
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)
- Gilbert Wardleyb. 1895AUAustralian rules footballer (1895–1971)
- Tom Wardleyb. 1897AUAustralian rules footballer (1897-1967)
- Stanley Wardleyb. 1901GBBritish engineer (1901–1965)
- John Wardleyb. 1950GBBritish roller coaster designer
- Stuart Wardleyb. 1974GBEnglish footballer (born 1974)
- Liz Wardleyb. 1979PGPapua New Guinean yacht racer
- Fabio Wardleyb. 1994GBBritish boxer
- Keyara Wardleyb. 2000CACanadian rugby sevens player (born 1998)
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 9 sources across 4 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 1.1K | #6,106 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 181 | #99,845 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 180 | #105,671 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 175 | #96,480 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 9 | #126,713 |
| CR Costa Rica | TSE — electoral roll (padrón) names | — | 1 | #24,067 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 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 Wardley mean, and where does it come from?
- from Wardley, or Wardley in Iping, Sussex; first attested William de Wardlegh 1296 Recorded by A Dictionary of English Surnames.
- In which country does Wardley have the most bearers?
- Wardley is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Wardley?
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/wardleyThe 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, “Wardley”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.