Leÿ

surname · Latin script

Leÿ is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. Recorded meaning: from a medieval personal name, Eloy (Latin Eligius, a derivative of eligere ‘to choose or elect’), made popular by a 6th-century saint who came to be venerated as the patron of smiths and horses.

rarermore common
  • NLNetherlands1 in 960K(measured from records)
  • USUnited States1 in 8.7Kas Leigh
  • SESweden1 in 39Kas Lei

carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Leÿ itself, the figure is that spelling’s, and it is named. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.

United States (measured from records)

38,258 named Leigh, 2020

2 (measured from records)

recorded for this name

Sources
42 (measured from records)

Highest-authority source

1 in 960K (inferred from the name graph)

Netherlands

measured from records inferred from the name graph

Name dossier (print, CSV)

Spellings & scripts(measured from records)

לייHebrew(measured from records)
LeighLatin(measured from records)

3 other spellings are counted as the same name:

Locally spelled Leigh in US United States and Ley in ES Spain.

Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records, and ○ marks a model's transliteration; click a spelling to open its page.

Meaning & origin(measured from records)

from a medieval personal name, Eloy (Latin Eligius, a derivative of eligere ‘to choose or elect’), made popular by a 6th-century saint who came to be venerated as the patron of smiths and horses.

Sources 4

  • Dictionary of American Family Names
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Wiktionary
  • Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]

Attested across 16 languages in the etymology graph.

Where in the world(measured from records)

Leÿ counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.

Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.

Where Leÿ is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States38,258as Leigh1 in 8.7K35KLeigh42
ES Spain381as Lei1 in 131K381Ley2
BR Brazil297as Lei1 in 713K316—1
SE Sweden263as Lei1 in 39K263——
PL Poland124as Lei1 in 309K90—2
DK Denmark80as Lei1 in 73K215—1
FI Finland50as Leigh1 in 111K143——
NL Netherlands181 in 960K34—2

38,258 people counted by Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex, 2020. Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.

Registers cited: Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); IBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror); IBGE — Nomes (census name API); Skatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup); dane.gov.pl — PESEL given names (first + second name position, 2026-01-20); Meertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (all-time BRP bearer counts, 2018); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.

Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).

Other names spelled this way(inferred from the name graph)

Leÿ is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • a separate surname7 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in United States, United Kingdom, India, Ecuador

    Also written Ley, Léý, Lệy, Lēy, Lêy

  • French surname12 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Belgium, United Kingdom

    Also written Ley, Lęy, Léy, Lëy, Lêy

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Evidence(measured from records)

No register attests this spelling yet

None of the official registers or reference works in our corpus lists Leÿ under this spelling. The statistics on this page rest on person records, and the related names are inferred from the name graph.

Frequently asked questions

What does the name Leÿ mean, and where does it come from?
from a medieval personal name, Eloy (Latin Eligius, a derivative of eligere ‘to choose or elect’), made popular by a 6th-century saint who came to be venerated as the patron of smiths and horses. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names and The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and 2 other sources.
In which country does Leÿ have the most bearers?
In the United States, the national register counted about 38 thousand people named Leigh, more than in any other country we hold.
Where is Leÿ most common?
Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Leÿ is densest in the Netherlands — about 1 in 960 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
How common is the name Leÿ?
In the Netherlands, the national register counted 18 people named Leÿ, about 1 in 960 thousand residents.

What do you want to know about Leÿ?

Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.

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Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/le%C3%BF

The 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, “Leÿ”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.

See how Leÿ parses inside a full name →