Rye
loc · Latin script
Meaning: (i) Person who lives at a place where rye is grown, or grower of rye; (ii) person living on a raised dry area in marshland; (iii) person living by a river
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Rye is a name written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in the United States.
- USUnited States
- AUAustralia
- 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
- 310 (measured from records)
no count published
Highest-authority source
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
(i) Person who lives at a place where rye is grown, or grower of rye; (ii) person living on a raised dry area in marshland; (iii) person living by a river.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 7 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Rye 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 | — | 4.1K | Rye | 310 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | 1.8K | Rye | 145 |
| AU Australia | — | 1 | Rye | 98 |
| CA Canada | — | 1 | Rye | 83 |
| RU Russia | — | — | Rye | 12 |
| NO Norway | — | 1.4K | — | 32 |
| DK Denmark | — | 527 | — | 4 |
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; Surnames of England and Wales (taliesin-arlein.net, Sept 2002 electoral register); SSB — Navnesøk (name-search service, living population); SA BDM — Popular baby names South Australia (1944–present); Danmarks Statistik — Hvor mange hedder...? (living-population name counts); Alberta Open Government — Frequency and Ranking of Baby Names by Year and Gender. 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)
Rye 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 Ryes, Calvados, or from ME at ther ye ‘at the island or low-lying land’; first attested Hubert de Ria 1169 P (Nf)
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
In English, on an island or patch of firm ground surrounded by fens, from a misdivision of the ME phrase atter ye at the island (OE cet pare ige, from eg island). 2. topographic name for someone who lived near a river or stream, from a misdivision of the ME phrase atter eye at the river (OE (St pare ea at the river, from ea river). 3. topographic Patr. (from Rudek): Rutkiewicz.
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A grain used extensively in Europe for making bread, beer, and (now generally) for animal fodder.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In Japanese, The katakana syllable リェ (rye) in Hepburn-like romanization.
as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)
In enm, rye (Secale cereale)
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)
- Olaf Ryeb. 1791NONorwegian-Danish general (1791-1849)
- Maria Ryeb. 1829GBBritish philanthropist (1829–1903)
- Diderik Hegermann Ryeb. 1832NONorwegian businessman
- Thomas Clarke Ryeb. 1863USAmerican politician (1863-1953)
- Stellan Ryeb. 1880DKDanish film director (1880–1914)
- Michael Ryeb. 1918USAmerican actor (1918-2012)
- Madhu Ryeb. 1942INGujarati author from India
- Renny Ryeb. 1947GBBritish television producer and television director
- Douglas Ryeb. 1950USAmerican actor-musician
- Joseph Ryeb. 2000GBBritish actor
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 33 sources across 17 countries.
Reference works 4
- The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- 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 Rye mean, and where does it come from?
- (i) Person who lives at a place where rye is grown, or grower of rye; (ii) person living on a raised dry area in marshland; (iii) person living by a river. Recorded by Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history].
- In which country does Rye have the most bearers?
- Rye is most frequently recorded in the United States, where it is most often spelled rye.
What do you want to know about Rye?
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/ryeThe 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, “Rye”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.