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Updated May 24, 2023

Boy name origins & meanings

  • Old English : From the rocky meadow

How Popular Is The Name Stanley

Family name origins & meanings

  • English : habitational name from any of the various places, for example in Derbyshire, County Durham, Gloucestershire, Staffordshire, Wiltshire, and West Yorkshire, so named from Old English stān ‘stone’ + lēah ‘wood’, ‘clearing’.
  • Americanized form of any of various like-sounding names in other European languages, for example Polish Stanislawski and Greek Anastasiou.
  • The explorer and journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) was born John Rowlands in Denbigh, Wales, but traveled as a cabin boy in 1858 from Liverpool, England, to New Orleans, LA, where he was adopted by a merchant surnamed Stanley. From the late 1860s he worked as a correspondent for the New York Herald, and traveled extensively in Africa.

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