Keys
surname · Latin script
Meaning: (i) different form of Kay; (ii) person from Guise, Picardy; (iii) from Irish Gaelic Mac Aodha
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/kiːz/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Keys is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in China than in any other country. In Ireland it is the 61st most common given name.
- GBUnited Kingdom≈1 in 473as Keith(inferred from the name graph)
- IEIreland≈1 in 483as Keith
- NZNew Zealand≈1 in 596as Keith
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). Where a country counts another spelling of the name rather than Keys 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.
- China (inferred from the name graph)
- #232 (measured from records)
- 3 (measured from records)
- Sources
- 634 (measured from records)
- 1 in 187 (inferred from the name graph)
≈2,100,000 named Keith, est.
of 15M given names
recorded for this name
Highest-authority source
Croatia, as Kata
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Spellings & scripts(measured from records)
One other spelling is counted as the same name:
Locally spelled Keith in US United States, GB United Kingdom, CA Canada and 4 more.
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)
(i) different form of Kay; (ii) person from Guise, Picardy; (iii) from Irish Gaelic Mac Aodha
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested in 1 language in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Keys 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 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CN China | — | ≈2,100,000 est. | ≈1 in 655 | — | Keith | 76 |
| US United States | #102 | 328,988as Keith | 1 in 1K | 328K | Keith | 634 |
| GB United Kingdom | #76 | ≈140,000 est. | ≈1 in 473 | 13 | Keith | 356 |
| CA Canada | #105 | ≈52,000 est. | ≈1 in 721 | 3 | Keith | 301 |
| EG Egypt | #757 | ≈47,000 est. | ≈1 in 2.2K | — | Keith | 27 |
| HR Croatia | — | 22,615as Kata | 1 in 187 | 23K | — | 1 |
| FI Finland | — | 10,946as Kati | 1 in 509 | 12K | — | 38 |
| IE Ireland | #61 | ≈11,000 est. | ≈1 in 483 | 6 | Keith | 165 |
| NZ New Zealand | #79 | ≈8,300 est. | ≈1 in 596 | 10 | Keith | 157 |
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; NRS — Baby names Scotland full list (1974–present); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender; DZS — Imena i prezimena (per-token lookup form); DIA — Baby name popularity (1900–present); CSO — Irish Babies Names (1998–present); DVV — Etunimitilasto (Finnish given names register); 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)
Keys is also recorded in one other lexicon, as a different name or as an ordinary word. These are senses of the spelling, not of the name above.
In Swedish, indefinite plural of key
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)
- Clement Melville Keysb. 1876CAfinancier, known for early development of commercial aviation businesses in the United States
- Ancel Keysb. 1904USAmerican nutritionist (1904-2004)
- Bobby Keysb. 1943USAmerican saxophonist (1943-2014)
- Richard Keysb. 1957GBBritish television sports presenter (born 1957)
- George Keysb. 1959NZNew Zealand rower
- Randolph Keysb. 1966USAmerican basketball player (born 1966)
- Amy Keysb. 1967USAmerican singer-songwriter
- Isaac Keysb. 1978USAmerican gridiron football player and actor (born 1978)
- Anetta Keysb. 1983CZpornographic performer (b. 1983)
- Madison Keysb. 1995USUS American tennis 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).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 22 sources across 12 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 19K | #1,900 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 19K | #1,894 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 18K | #1,860 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 5
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- Wikipedia surname 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
- What does the name Keys mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) different form of Kay; (ii) person from Guise, Picardy; (iii) from Irish Gaelic Mac Aodha Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- How do you pronounce Keys?
- A machine transcription gives /kiːz/ (IPA) for English.
- In which country does Keys have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 2.1 million people named Keith in China, more than in any other country we hold.
- Where is Keys most common?
- No national register we hold counts the spelling Keys itself. The densest figure for its family of spellings is Croatia's: the national register counts about 1 in 187 people named Kata.
- How common is the name Keys?
- In the United States, the national register counted 328,988 people named Keith in 2020, about 1 in 1.0 thousand residents.
- How common is Keys compared with other names?
- In Ireland, Keys is the 61st most common given name of 14,976 given names recorded there.
What do you want to know about Keys?
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/keysThe 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, “Keys” — the 61st most common given name in Ireland. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.