Fly
org · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Fly is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States. Recorded meaning: table From Middle English flye, flie, from Old English flȳġe, flēoge (“a fly”), from Proto-Germanic *fleugǭ (“a fly”), from Proto-Indo-European *plewk- (“to fly”).
- HKHong Kong
- USUnited States
- GBUnited Kingdom
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.
- United States (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 264 (measured from records)
no count published
Highest-authority source
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
- Middle Englishflye(measured from records)
- Old Englishflȳġe“a fly”(measured from records)
- Proto-Germanic*fleugǭ“a fly”(measured from records)
- Proto-Indo-European*plewk-“to fly”(measured from records)
table From Middle English flye, flie, from Old English flȳġe, flēoge (“a fly”), from Proto-Germanic *fleugǭ (“a fly”), from Proto-Indo-European *plewk- (“to fly”). Cognate with Scots flee, Saterland Frisian Fljooge, Dutch vlieg, German Low German Fleeg, German Fliege, Danish flue, Norwegian Bokmål flue, Norwegian Nynorsk fluge, Swedish fluga, Icelandic fluga.
Sources 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples)
- Wiktionary
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Fly counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 2.3K | Fly | 264 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | — | Fly | 57 |
| AU Australia | — | 1 | Fly | 36 |
| HK Hong Kong | — | — | Fly | 6 |
| CA Canada | — | — | Fly | 37 |
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 2000; SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present). 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).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Mollie Flyb. 1847USAmerican photographer (1847–1925)
- James Lawrence Flyb. 1898USAmerican lawyer (1898-1966)
- Emerson H. Flyb. 1935USAmerican academic (1935-2017)
- Michael Flyb. 1983USAmerican basketball coach
- Jamie Flyb. 2000USAmerican business executive
- Henry FlyEnglish cleric; (died 1833)
- Quinton FlyUSbasketball player
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 12 sources across 6 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.3K | #12,611 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.1K | #14,042 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2K | #14,561 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
- Søndergaard, Georg, Danske efternavne (Lademann 1984/1991)
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 Fly mean, and where does it come from?
- table From Middle English flye, flie, from Old English flȳġe, flēoge (“a fly”), from Proto-Germanic *fleugǭ (“a fly”), from Proto-Indo-European *plewk- (“to fly”). Recorded by The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland and 국립국어원 외래어 표기 용례 자료 (NIKL loanword/foreign-name transcription examples) and 1 other source.
- In which country does Fly have the most bearers?
- Fly is most frequently recorded in the United States, where it is most often spelled fly.
What do you want to know about Fly?
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/flyThe 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, “Fly”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.