Cray
surname · English · Latin script
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
Cray is a surname, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. In Isle of Man it is the 9th most common surname. It appears chiefly in English and , written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: from Irish Gaelic Ó Craoibhe, from a nickname meaning ‘curly-headed one’ or ‘prolific one’.
- AUAustralia1 in 79K◐
- GBUnited Kingdom1 in 113K
- USUnited States1 in 122K
carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.
- ≈3.8K ●
- 2 ●
- Sources
- 247 ●
- 1 in 17K ◐
across 13 countries
recorded for this name
31K records
Official registry-verified
Norway
Spellings & scripts●
Locally spelled Crea in LA Laos.
Spellings marked ● are how people bearing the name write it in our records; ○ marks a model's transliteration. Click a spelling to open its page.
Meaning & origin●
from Irish Gaelic Ó Craoibhe, from a nickname meaning ‘curly-headed one’ or ‘prolific one’.
Sources 1
- Encyclopedia of surnames [the complete companion to tracing your names history]
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world●
Sorted by bearers counted by national registers, records where none counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | — | 2,719 | 26K rec. | 1 in 122K | 2.7K | Cray | 247 |
| GB United Kingdom | — | 2,064 | 2K rec. | — | 4 | Cray | 82 |
| AU Australia | — | 1,060 | 1K rec. | — | — | Cray | 62 |
| CA Canada | — | 389 | 426 rec. | — | — | Cray | 35 |
| NO Norway | — | 316△ | 10 rec. | 1 in 17K | 316 | — | 3 |
| BR Brazil | — | 266△ | 3 rec. | 1 in 796K | 266 | — | 1 |
| AR Argentina | — | 257 | — | 1 in 177K | 257 | — | — |
| IT Italy | — | 170 | 183 rec. | — | 1 | Cray | 6 |
| IE Ireland | — | 80 | 65 rec. | — | — | Cray | 19 |
| LB Lebanon | — | 74 | 75 rec. | — | — | Cray | 1 |
| TH Thailand | — | 67 | 59 rec. | — | #859,663 | Cray | 11 |
| NZ New Zealand | — | 67 | 63 rec. | — | — | Cray | 9 |
Roughly 2.7K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 122K). Estimates project the name's share of our records onto national population, so each is only as good as the record base beside it — the Basis column gives that base; rows marked △ rest on fewer records than the estimate itself and are order-of-magnitude at best.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table. How that works.
Languages●
- English29K82%
- 1.2K3%
- Spanish1.1K3%
- French9893%
- Welsh7382%
Show as table
| Name | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| English | 29,044 | 82% |
| 1,194 | 3% | |
| Spanish | 1,066 | 3% |
| French | 989 | 3% |
| Welsh | 738 | 2% |
Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.
Other recorded senses●
Cray is also recorded in 3 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 Foots Cray, North Cray, St Mary Cray or St Paul’s Cray, Kent; first attested Gunnilda de Craie 1203 FFK
as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames
cendant of Craobhach’, a byname meaning ‘Curly(headed)’ or ‘Prolific’ (from craobh branch, bough).
as a nameThe Oxford Names Companion - The definitive guide to Surnames, First Names, and Place Names of the British Isles
In English, A crayfish or lobster.
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.
Over time●
Show as table
| Year | records |
|---|---|
| 1962 | 6 |
| 1988 | 6 |
| 1989 | 5 |
| 1990 | 5 |
| 1992 | 6 |
| 1993 | 9 |
| 1994 | 5 |
| 1995 | 8 |
| 1996 | 7 |
| 1998 | 6 |
| 2000 | 5 |
| 2001 | 7 |
| 2002 | 5 |
| 2003 | 6 |
| 2005 | 6 |
| 2006 | 6 |
| 2010 | 5 |
| 2011 | 8 |
US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 18 years between 1962–2011. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.
Notable people with this name●
- Chick Crayb. 1921GBEnglish cricketer (1921-2008)
- Seymour Crayb. 1925USApplied mathematician, computer scientist, and electrical engineer (1925–1996)
- Graham Crayb. 1947GBArchbishops' Missioner and Team Leader of Fresh Expressions; Bishop of Maidstone; British Anglican bishop
- Robert Crayb. 1953USAmerican blues guitarist and singer (b. 1953)
- Dianne Crayb. 1956NZNew Zealand artist (born 1956)
- Fred Crayb. 1957USAmerican photographic artist (born 1957)
- Richard Crayb. 1958USAmerican actor and singer
- Andrew Crayb. 1986USAmerican LGBT rights activist and political figure
- Eric Crayb. 1988PHFilipino-American track and field athlete
- Dorothy M. CrayGBBritish novelist
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●
Attested in 25 sources across 13 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 2.7K | #10,689 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 2.7K | #11,560 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 2.4K | #12,545 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 240 | #32,331 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 41 | #120,411 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex | 2020 | 21 | #32,331 |
| ES Spain | INE — Padrón per-token widgets (current living counts, given + apellidos) | — | 17 | #91,572 |
| FR France | INSEE — Fichier des noms de famille (1891–2000) | 1951 | 11 | — |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 10 | #43,739 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 10 | #44,751 |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 1993 | 9 | — |
| US United States | SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) | 2011 | 8 | — |
Reference works 4
- 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 2026-09-12 data build · 54 rows in the corpus for this spelling.
Frequently asked questions
- How common is the name Cray?
- We estimate roughly 3.8 thousand people bear Cray (counting its spellings and scripts) across 13 countries in our records.
- In which country does Cray have the most bearers?
- We estimate about 2.7 thousand people bear Cray in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled cray.
- How common is Cray compared with other names?
- In Isle of Man, Cray is the 9th most common surname of 273 surnames recorded there.
- What does the name Cray mean?
- Recorded meaning: from Irish Gaelic Ó Craoibhe, from a nickname meaning ‘curly-headed one’ or ‘prolific one’.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/crayThe same payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. Rate-limited for casual use. Bulk access and licensing.
About this data
Data snapshot . Figures are rebuilt periodically and will change.
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, “Cray” — the 9th most common surname in Isle of Man. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.