Wortley
surname · Latin script
Meaning: Person from Wortley, one in Yorkshire meaning 'glade where vegetables grow', the other perhaps 'Wyrca's glade'
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 6 countries · latest register: dane.gov.pl, 2026
/wortlei/(machine-generated) Spanish · model-generated
Wortley 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)Person from Wortley, one in Yorkshire meaning 'glade where vegetables grow', the other perhaps 'Wyrca's glade'.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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)Wortley 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, from Wortley, West Riding of Yorkshire; first attested Henry de Wortelay 1204 Cur (Yorkshire)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, An inner city area of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England (OS grid ref SE2732).
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)- Sir Francis Wortley, 1st Baronetb. 1591English Baronet
- Rothesay Stuart Wortleyb. 1892GBBritish flying ace (1892-1926)
- Alexander Wortleyb. 1899English eccentric (1899–1980)
- H. Wortleyb. 1916JMbadminton player
- George C. Wortleyb. 1926USAmerican politician and World War II veteran (1926-2014)
- John Wortleyb. 1934GBBritish-Canadian professor and Byzantinist (1934-2019)
- Richard K. Wortleyb. 1954AUforensic psychologist and academic
- Russell Wortleyb. 1957AUAustralian politician
- Dana Wortleyb. 1959AUAustralian politician
- Martin Michael Wortleyb. 1971GBvictim of the September 11th attacks
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 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register) | 2002 | 1.3K | #5,494 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 543 | #42,928 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 504 | #40,833 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 489 | #44,034 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 46 | — |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 10 | #120,154 |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 4 | #118,617 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 3 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 3 | #298,820 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- 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 Wortley mean, and where does it come from?
- Person from Wortley, one in Yorkshire meaning 'glade where vegetables grow', the other perhaps 'Wyrca's glade'. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Wortley?
- In Spanish /wortlei/. Transcriptions are machine-generated except where a dictionary is named.
- In which country does Wortley have the most bearers?
- Wortley is most frequently recorded in the United States.
What do you want to know about Wortley?
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/wortleyThe 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, “Wortley”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.