Boyce
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) person who lives by a wood; (ii) son of Boy; (iii) from Irish Gaelic O Buadhaigh
(measured from records)Officially recorded in 27 countries · latest register: Guyana, 2025
Boyce is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- GYGuyana1 in 1.7K(measured from records)
- VCSt. Vincent & Grenadines1 in 4.1K
- USUnited States1 in 13K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. Countries with no figure are shown too: flat where a national register lists the name without counting it, hatched where only our records hold it. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Record sources
- 133 (measured from records)
- 1 in 1.7K (inferred from the name graph)
26,376 people, 2010
corpus datasets behind its best-documented spelling
strongest: highest-authority source
Guyana
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin
(measured from records)(i) person who lives by a wood; (ii) son of Boy; (iii) from Irish Gaelic O Buadhaigh.
Cited for this meaning 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Where in the world
(measured from records)Boyce 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.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 26,376 | 1 in 13K | 26K | Boyce | 133 |
| GY Guyana | — | 450 | 1 in 1.7K | 450 | — | — |
| ES Spain | — | 49 | 1 in 1M | 49 | Boyce | 9 |
| NL Netherlands | — | 31 | 1 in 557K | 31 | — | 3 |
| NO Norway | — | 26 | 1 in 210K | 26 | — | — |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | — | 25 | 1 in 4.1K | 25 | — | — |
| FI Finland | — | 25 | 1 in 223K | 25 | — | 1 |
| CV Cape Verde | #946 | — | — | — | Boyce | 2 |
26,376 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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 — Surname Frequency 2010; Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025; INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos); INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal); CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). 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 recorded senses
(measured from records)Boyce is also recorded in 5 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 Old French del bois, ‘of or by the wood’; in Scotland by the 13th century. Hugh Delboys is recorded at St Andrews in 1185; later form Boece, with Boys.
as a nameScottish Surnames
In English, An English habitational surname from Old French for someone living near the woods.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In English, from the wood or forest; Old French
as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…
In English, v. BOYES
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In Irish, An English name of Norman origin (from French bois) established in various counties. In Donegal and the west it is an anglicized form of Ó Buadhaigh (Bogue)
as a nameThe Surnames of Ireland
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 Boyceb. 1711GBEnglish composer and organist (1711-1779)
- George Price Boyceb. 1826GBBritish artist (1826-1897)
- William D. Boyceb. 1858USBusinessman and founder of Scouting in America (1858-1929)
- Mary Boyceb. 1920GBBritish scholar in Iranian Studies (1920–2006)
- Raymond F. Boyceb. 1946USAmerican computer scientist (1947–1974)
- Todd Boyceb. 1961USAmerican actor
- Sonia Boyceb. 1962GBBritish Afro-Caribbean visual artist
- Emmerson Boyceb. 1979BBBarbadian footballer
- Lionel Boyceb. 1991USAmerican actor (born 1991)
- Cameron Boyceb. 1999USAmerican actor (1999–2019)
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)45 registers and reference works attest this spelling, across 27 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 26K | #1,337 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 26K | #1,223 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 26K | #1,327 |
| GY Guyana | Guyana — Official List of Electors July 2025 | 2025 | 450 | #251 |
| ES Spain | INE — Apellidos más frecuentes (Padrón Municipal) | — | 49 | #45,574 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 49 | #45,014 |
| NL Netherlands | CBG Familienamenbank — Dutch surname bearer counts (GBA/BRP 2007) | 2007 | 31 | #40,453 |
| NO Norway | SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population) | — | 26 | #37,966 |
| VC St. Vincent & Grenadines | Electoral Office of St Vincent & the Grenadines — Final Voters List (Nov 2025) | 2025 | 25 | #237 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 25 | #40,091 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Rymut, Słownik nazwisk współcześnie w Polsce używanych (10 vols, IJP PAN, Kraków 1992–1994) — every Polish surname in the PESEL register at the end of 1990, with bearer counts nationally and per voivodeship1990
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 Boyce mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) person who lives by a wood; (ii) son of Boy; (iii) from Irish Gaelic O Buadhaigh. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Boyce have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 26 thousand people named Boyce, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled boyce.
- Where is Boyce most common?
- Measured as a share of residents rather than as a count, Boyce is densest in Guyana — about 1 in 1.7 thousand people — even though United States holds more of our records for it.
- How common is the name Boyce?
- In the United States, the national register counted 26,376 people named Boyce in 2010, about 1 in 13 thousand residents.
- How common is Boyce compared with other names?
- In Cape Verde, Boyce is the 946th most common surname of 2,258 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Boyce?
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/boyceThe 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, “Boyce” — the 946th most common surname in Cape Verde. Data snapshot 2026-10-13.