Percy

given name · Spanish · Latin script

Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise

Percy is a given name, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country. It appears chiefly in Spanish and English, written in the Latin script. Recorded meaning: ‘Person from Percy’, a place-name in northern France.

rarermore common
  • ZASouth Africa1 in 5.9K◐
  • CACanada1 in 20K
  • GBUnited Kingdom1 in 21K

carrying the name, one hue, darker where it is more common. Hover a country for its figure.

≈13K ●

across 8 countries

Sources
351 ●

257K records

Official registry-verified

1 in 7.2K ◐

Sweden

Meaning & origin●

‘Person from Percy’, a place-name in northern France.

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.

Where Percy is recorded, by country
CountryMost common spellingSources
US United States—10,568201K rec.1 in 31K11KPercy351
GB United Kingdom—9,65514K rec.—3Percy131
PE Peru—6,1005K rec.——Percy78
ZA South Africa#6615,7496.4K rec.——Percy69
CA Canada—4,0935K rec.—3Percy93
AU Australia—3,4947.1K rec.—3Percy129
PH Philippines—3,1453.3K rec.——Percy39
NL Netherlands—1,969446 rec.—255Percy30
SE Sweden—1,409△222 rec.1 in 7.2K1.4KPercy44
IT Italy—736886 rec.——Percy18
CN China—676750 rec.——Percy27
EG Egypt—412478 rec.——Percy11

Roughly 11K people in United States bear this name (about 1 in 31K). 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●

  • Spanish248K49%
  • English203K40%
  • Portuguese13K3%
  • Swahili4.7K1%
  • German3.7K1%
Show as table
Languages in which the name is recorded
NameRecordsNote
Spanish247,83049%
English202,71040%
Portuguese12,6993%
Swahili4,7201%
German3,7401%

Language is read off each record's context, not declared by the bearer; a share is of all records for this spelling.

Other names spelled this way◐

Percy is also recorded as 2 other names, grouped separately because the records behind them do not connect to the one described above.

  • Spanish given name275K records spelled Percy4 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in Peru, United States, Brazil, Argentina

    Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian

    Also written Përčÿ

  • French given name5.5K records spelled Percy5 spellings in the group

    Most recorded in France, United States, Peru, South Africa

    Languages: French, Catalan

    Also written Pércy, Përçÿ, Pérçy

67 further groups record this spelling and are not listed here.

Grouping is the name graph's, not a register's: two spellings join a group when the evidence links them, so a group is a claim about the records rather than about the people.

Other recorded senses●

Percy 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 Percy-en-Auge, Calvados; first attested William de Perci 1086 DB

    as a nameA Dictionary of English Surnames

  • In English, An English surname from Old French.

    as a wordkaikki.org Wiktionary extract (IPA + transliterations)

  • In English, short form of Percival

    as a nameBaby names, 25,350 baby names nicknames for your family, friends pets, including the top 100 names, 2,000 most popular…

  • In German, ['pa:si]: im 19. Jh. aus dem Englischen übernommener männl.

    as a nameDUDEN Lexikon der Vornamen

  • [Ignoto]

    as a nameIl grande libro dei nomi per bebè. Significato, origini, curiosità. Oltre 7000 nomi per bambine e bambini Significato,…

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●

0200400600800190019502000603 · 1921

Show as table
Percy in SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present), United States, 1880–2025
Yearrecords
188094
188195
1882126
188387
1884126
188598
1886122
1887123
1888151
1889144
1890140
1891131
1892149
1893177
1894173
1895164
1896157
1897183
1898155
1899142
1900201
1901120
1902167
1903124
1904125
1905169
1906141
1907160
1908151
1909159
1910195
1911184
1912337
1913356
1914449
1915488
1916524
1917515
1918567
1919595
1920601
1921603
1922599
1923540
1924560
1925544
1926493
1927519
1928483
1929497
1930429
1931415
1932430
1933399
1934377
1935385
1936360
1937356
1938349
1939360
1940328
1941339
1942381
1943393
1944350
1945343
1946343
1947412
1948411
1949397
1950411
1951424
1952443
1953376
1954363
1955309
1956319
1957348
1958280
1959264
1960270
1961246
1962250
1963235
1964207
1965193
1966195
1967178
1968181
1969202
1970175
1971187
1972177
1973169
1974147
1975143
1976138
1977137
1978146
1979119
1980124
1981130
1982114
1983105
198498
198596
198691
198773
1988107
198998
1990102
199188
199295
199371
199475
199565
199661
199762
199861
199956
200052
200159
200246
200347
200460
200545
200651
200757
200837
200938
201041
201139
201260
201361
201470
201558
201647
201773
201863
201945
202069
202187
2022112
2023112
2024157
2025154

US SSA — National Baby Names (1880–present) — 146 years between 1880–2025. One register's own figures, never a sum across registers: two registers counting the same people would double them.

Notable people with this name●

17001800190020002100Percy Bysshe Shelley, b. 1792Percy Fawcett, b. 1867Walter Chrysler, b. 1875Percy Williams Bridgman, b. 1882Percy Grainger, b. 1882Charles Percy Snow, b. 1905Percy Herbert, b. 1920Dickie Jones, b. 1927Steve Harris, b. 1956Percy Hynes White, b. 2001

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 84 sources across 47 countries.

Official registers attesting Percy
CountryRegisterYearCountRank
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex202011K#2,330
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 201020104.2K#7,837
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 202020204.1K#7,828
US United StatesCensus Bureau — Surname Frequency 200020004K#7,631
SE SwedenSkatteverket — Sök hur många som har ett visst namn (living population)—1.4K#1,347
SE SwedenSCB — Namnstatistik (to 2023)2020485—
BR BrazilIBGE — Nomes (census name API)—423#15,873
BR BrazilIBGE — names by decade (Kaggle mirror)2022399—
BR BrazilIBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname)—369#15,612
US United StatesCensus Bureau — First Name Frequency 2020 by sex2020345#2,330
NL NetherlandsMeertens NVB — Nederlandse Voornamenbank (live per-name BRP counts, 1790-2017)—255#4,783
CR Costa RicaTSE — electoral roll (padrón) names—173#1,557

Reference works 6

  • The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland
  • Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
  • Wikipedia given-name tokens
  • Wikipedia surname tokens
  • Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
  • jeantosti.com — Dictionnaire des noms de famille de France et d'ailleurs (Jean Tosti)

These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.

Register rows as of the 2026-09-12 data build · 720 rows in the corpus for this spelling.

Frequently asked questions

How common is the name Percy?
We estimate roughly 13 thousand people bear Percy (counting its spellings and scripts) across 8 countries in our records.
In which country does Percy have the most bearers?
We estimate about 11 thousand people bear Percy in the United States, more than in any other country in our records, where it is most often spelled percy.
How common is Percy compared with other names?
In South Africa, Percy is the 661st most common given name of 215,346 given names recorded there.
Is Percy a male or female name?
Percy is a male name in our records. Opposite-gender entries fall within the cross-gender noise we measure in the source data, so we don't report them as usage.
What does the name Percy mean?
Recorded meaning: ‘Person from Percy’, a place-name in northern France.
Query this name via API
curl https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/percy

The 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

● measured from records◐ inferred from the name graph○ machine-generated

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, “Percy” — the 661st most common given name in South Africa. Data snapshot 2026-09-12.

See how Percy parses inside a full name →