Gwilym
given name · Latin script
Meaning: from the Welsh personal name Gwilym (William); attested in Monm 1610 as Willim ap Meiler and in 1553 as Gwillim/Gwillin forms
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/ɡwɪɫɪm/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Gwilym is a given name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- AUAustralia
- 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 the Welsh personal name Gwilym (William); attested in Monm 1610 as Willim ap Meiler and in 1553 as Gwillim/Gwillin forms.
Sources 1
- Welsh Surnames
Attested across 14 languages 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)
Gwilym 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 Welsh, from Welsh personal name Gwilym, a borrowing of William; earliest cited forms include Gwilim in 13th–14th c. texts.
as a nameWelsh Surnames
Welsh form of William, in use since the Middle Ages.
as a nameA concise dictionary of first names
Welsh form of WILLIAM , in use since the Middle Ages, and currently undergoing a revival in popularity.
as a word
In Welsh, a male given name, equivalent to English William
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)
- Gwilym Puwb. 1618GBWelsh poet
- Gwilym Ivor Thomasb. 1893GBBritish Army general (1893–1972)
- Gwilym Lloyd Georgeb. 1894GBBritish politician (1894-1967)
- Gwilym R. Jonesb. 1903GBWelsh poet (1903-1993)
- Gwilym Ellis Lane Owenb. 1922GBWelsh philosopher (1922–1982)
- Gwilym Prichardb. 1931GBWelsh artist (1931–2015)
- Gwilym Jenkinsb. 1932GBWelsh statistician (1932–1982)
- Gwilym Peter Lewisb. 1952GBBritish botanist
- Gwilym Emyr Owen IIIb. 1960USAmerican singer
- Gwilym Leeb. 1983GBBritish actor
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)
A formal English salutation is built on the surname, so it needs a full name — on its own, a first name only supports the informal form.
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 15 sources across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 10 | #41,032 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 10 | #41,634 |
| NL Netherlands | Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018) | — | 6 | #24,300 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2005 | 5 | — |
| SE Sweden | Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population) | — | 3 | #54,282 |
| AU Australia | SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present) | 2003 | 1 | — |
| GB United Kingdom | A Concise Dictionary of First Names (Hanks & Hodges, 2001) | — | — | — |
| NL Netherlands | Babynamen — Lijst met meer dan 22.000 namen (Amelia King, 2020) | — | — | — |
| GB United Kingdom | The Penguin Book of Baby Names (David Pickering) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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
- How do you pronounce Gwilym?
- A machine transcription gives /ɡwɪɫɪm/ (IPA) for English.
- What does the name Gwilym mean, and where does it come from?
- from the Welsh personal name Gwilym (William); attested in Monm 1610 as Willim ap Meiler and in 1553 as Gwillim/Gwillin forms. Recorded by Welsh Surnames.
- What are other forms of the name Gwilym?
- In the etymology graph, William, Guillermo and Willie are forms of the same name in other languages; Gwil is a recorded short or pet form.
- Is Gwilym a male or female name?
- Gwilym is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
- In which country does Gwilym have the most bearers?
- Gwilym is most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
What do you want to know about Gwilym?
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/gwilymThe 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, “Gwilym”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.