Mawdesley
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘Person from Mawdesley’, Lancashire, probably meaning ‘Maud’s glade’
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 2 countries
/məaʊdzɫi/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Mawdesley is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
- GBUnited Kingdom
- AUAustralia
- NLNetherlands
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 Mawdesley’, Lancashire, probably meaning ‘Maud’s glade’.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
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)Mawdesley 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, Lancs., recorded in 1219 as Madesle and in 1269 as Mau¬ des ley, i.e. probably ‘clearing of Maud’ (see Moult i). Vars.: Mawdsley, Maudsley, Maudslay.
as a nameA dictionary of surnames
In English, Lancs., recorded in 1219 as Madesle and in 1269 as Moudesley, i.e. probably ‘clearing of Maud' (see Moult i). Vars.: Mawdsley, Maudsley, Maudslay. Mawhinney see McKenzie Maulkin see Malkin Mawsom see Moult Mauitby see Maltby
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
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 Mawdesley Bestb. 1809GBBritish barrister
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)5 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 2 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GB United Kingdom | A Dictionary of Surnames (Hanks & Hodges, 1988) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, voter-file supplement (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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 Mawdesley mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘Person from Mawdesley’, Lancashire, probably meaning ‘Maud’s glade’. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Mawdesley?
- A machine transcription gives /məaʊdzɫi/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Mawdesley have the most bearers?
- Mawdesley is most frequently recorded in the United Kingdom.
What do you want to know about Mawdesley?
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/mawdesleyThe 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, “Mawdesley”. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.